Time Machine external USB drive not available at boot

I have a late 2012 iMac running Mavericks 10.4.9. I use Time Machine with a Toshiba 3TB external drive. The Toshiba drive is usually left powered up. Every time I boot the iMac and try to force a backup, Time Machine reports the Toshiba disk is not available. When I open Time Machine preferences, the Toshiba drive does not show until I power-cycle it and re-select it. Also occasionally it reports that I did not eject it properly. But it NEVER shows in Devices or on my desk top (like a thumb-drive does for example) so I wouldn't know how to eject it anyway.
Any ideas on where I am going wrong?
Thanks!

I also have a MacBook Pro with Leopard. I have a new 500GB Lacie d2 safe external drive that my computer recognizes but Time machine does not. Formating the disk in journaled Mac OS Extended format does not solve the problem. Lacie says they are working on it. Anyone have any ideas?

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Time Machine External Hard Drive not visible

I use a hard disc attached to a new mac mini (2014) for my time machine backups. I have an apple airport extreme base station. I have two macbook pros on the network. One of the machines accesses the hard drive attached to the mini with no problems when doing a time machine back up.
The other does not see or recognize the hard disc. The only icon available in the time machine preferences is a generic "Other Time Capsule."
I have tried all the suggestions found here, OS X Mountain Lion: If Time Machine can’t find your backup disk, with no luck.
I have also gone to the library preferences and deleted the preference file for time machine. Again no luck.
The macbook pro that cannot access the hard disc used for time machine back ups is running the latest Mac OS (10.9.4).
I'm stumped. Any ideas? Thank you.

See Pondini's TM FAQs.
iMac refurb (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), SL & ML, G4 450 MP w/Leopard, 9.2.2

Time Machine & external hard drives not used daily

I have a question about Time Machine and external hard drives that I used for storing digital files. I do not need to turn on these drives every day. Or even every week. Is Time Machine going to "forget" them (delete their files from backups) if I don't turn them on regularly? What do I do to make sure they are safely backed up and that they stay backed up even if they aren't turned on every day?

As I said, then, "Time Machine will simply pick up wherever it left off." Just be sure to properly eject the drive before disconnecting or shutting off.
The "speed" question is a new one not present in your original post. You can address that in the following:
Kappy's Personal Suggestions About Mac Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utility is: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption. Drive Genius provides additional tools not found in Disk Warrior for defragmentation of older drives, disk repair, disk scans, formatting, partitioning, disk copy, and benchmarking.
Four outstanding sources of information on Mac maintenance are:
1. OS X Maintenance - MacAttorney.
2. Mac maintenance Quick Assist
3. Maintaining Mac OS X
4. Mac Maintenance Guide
Periodic Maintenance
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) See Mac OS X- About background maintenance tasks. If you are running Leopard or later these tasks are run automatically, so there is no need to use any third-party software to force running these tasks.
If you are using a pre-Leopard version of OS X, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts was significantly reduced after Tiger. (These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard, Lion, or Mountain Lion and should not be installed.)
Defragmentation
OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive except when trying to install Boot Camp on a fragmented drive. But you don't need to buy third-party software. All you need is a spare external hard drive and Carbon Copy Cloner.
Cheap and Easy Defragmentation
You will have to backup your OS X partition to an external drive, boot from the external drive, use Disk Utility to repartition and reformat your hard drive back to a single volume, then restore your backup to the internal hard drive. You will use Carbon Copy Cloner to create the backup and to restore it.
1. Get an empty external hard drive and clone your internal drive to the
       external one.
2. Boot from the external hard drive.
3. Erase the internal hard drive.
4. Restore the external clone to the internal hard drive.
Clone the internal drive to the external drive
1. Open Carbon Copy Cloner.
2. Select the Source volume from the left side dropdown menu.
3. Select the Destination volume from the left side dropdown menu.
4. Be sure the Block Copy button is not depressed or is ghosted.
5. Click on the Clone button.
Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager appears. Select the icon for the external drive and click on the upward pointing arrow button.
After startup do the following:
Erase internal hard drive
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your internal hard drive (this is the entry with the
       mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the
       drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is
       failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be
       reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the
       DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the
       drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended
       (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to
       GUID then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait
       until the process has completed.
Restore the clone to the internal hard drive
1. Open Carbon Copy Cloner.
2. Select the Source volume from the left side dropdown menu.
3. Select the Destination volume from the left side dropdown menu.
4. Be sure the Block Copy button is not selected or is ghosted.
5. Click on the Clone button.
Destination means the internal hard drive. Source means the external startup drive.
Note that the Source and Destination drives are swapped for this last procedure.
Malware Protection
As for malware protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. Starting with Lion, Apple has included built-in malware protection that is automatically updated as necessary. To assure proper protection, update your system software when Apple releases new OS X updates for your computer.
Helpful Links Regarding Malware Protection:
1. Mac Malware Guide.
2. Detecting and avoiding malware and spyware
3. Macintosh Virus Guide
For general anti-virus protection I recommend only using ClamXav, but it is not necessary if you are keeping your computer's operating system software up to date. You should avoid any other third-party software advertised as providing anti-malware/virus protection. They are not required and could cause the performance of your computer to drop.
Cache Clearing
I recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX 2.4.3, Mountain Lion Cache Cleaner 7.0.9, Maintenance 1.6.8, or Cocktail 5.1.1 that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc. Corrupted cache files can cause slowness, kernel panics, and other issues. Although this is not a frequent nor a recurring problem, when it does happen there are tools such as those above to fix the problem.
If you are using Snow Leopard or earlier, then for emergency cleaning install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the command line. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard. (AppleJack works with Snow Leopard or earlier.)
Installing System Updates or Upgrades
Repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand.
Update your backups in case an update goes bad.
Backup and Restore
Having a backup and restore strategy is one of the most important things you can do to maintain your computer. Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. You can never have too many backups. Don't rely on just one. Make several using different backup utilities. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
     1. Carbon Copy Cloner
     2. Get Backup
     3. Deja Vu
     4. SuperDuper!
     5. Synk Pro
     6. Tri-Backup
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance and backup and restore.
Always have a current backup before performing any system updates or upgrades.
Final Suggestions
Be sure you have an adequate amount of RAM installed for the number of applications you run concurrently. Be sure you leave a minimum of 10% of the hard drive's capacity or 20 GBs, whichever is greater, as free space. Avoid installing utilities that rely on Haxies, SIMBL, or that alter the OS appearance, add features you will rarely if ever need, etc. The more extras you install the greater the probability of having problems. If you install software be sure you know how to uninstall it. Avoid installing multiple new software at the same time. Install one at a time and use it for a while to be sure it's compatible.
Additional reading may be found in:
1. Mac OS X speed FAQ
2. Speeding up Macs
3. Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
4. Essential Mac Maintenance: Get set up
5. Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines
6. Five Mac maintenance myths
7. How to Speed up Macs
8. Myths of required versus not required maintenance for Mac OS X
Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate.
Most if not all maintenance is for troubleshooting problems. If your computer is running OK, then there isn't really a thing you need to do except repair the hard drive and permissions before installing any new system updates.

Time Machine- external hard drive not appearing

I'm trying to set up Time Machine. However, the Maxtor one touch 4 plus drive is not appearing as an option to choose to set as back up drive?
Any suggestions?

Make sure it's not formatted as FAT32?

Time Machine external hard drive not recognized

I connected an Iomega Ultramax 500GB Hard Drive to my imac to set up time machine. It has worked well for years but now has disappeared and time machine no longer backs up to the hard drive. The drive is recognized in the system profiler and I have tried Repair Disk with the Disk Utility but get the message:
Invalid record count
Volume check failed
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
Can someone give me some guidance? Thanks!

If you don't have backups, and the drive doesn't work, you may have lost all the data. There are ways to try to recover data from a failed drive, but I have no experience with that and can't help. If the data is valuable to you, your best chance is to send the drive to a data-recovery service such as DriveSavers, but that will be very expensive.

My MacBook w/ OSX 10.6.8 cannot access my external Time Machine Backup USB Drive. It says it is a Read Only drive. When I went to change permissions I found all pernissions were listed as "Custom" and I could not reset them to "Read Write". Any help!

My MacBook w/ OSX 10.6.8 cannot access my external Time Machine Backup USB Drive. It says it is a Read Only drive. When I went to change permissions I found all pernissions were listed as "Custom" and I could not reset them to "Read Write". Any help would be appreciated.

This can be done easily with ethernet.
Please follow the instructions strictly.
To make it easier I want you to do this overnight so you can turn off all your current connection to the internet.
Just go to the airport fan in to the top right and turn airport off.
Get ethernet cable and connect the laptop to the TC lan port.. ie <-> ones.
Press and hold the reset on the TC for about 10sec. until the front led flashes rapidly.
Open the airport utility.. go to manual setup and change the wireless to off. (so other people around you cannot join your network of one).
Ignore all the errors.. they won't stop the backup working.
Go to the TM and reselect the backup target disk as the TC.
It should start after 2min and run through to completion.
That is it.. for a backup of many GB it might take a few hours.. so make sure the laptop has power plugged in and the sleep is off.. (on early ones I think this is needed but I am a late arrival to the scene).. sleep doesn't affect later OS.

Time machine external hard drive requires repair every time I turned the computer off or after I ejected the external hard drive?

Time machine external hard drive requires repair every time I turned the computer off or after I ejected the external hard drive?

What kind of repair?

Firewire thunderbolt adaptor does not recognize my time machine external hard drive

Hi everybody. I have a retina MacBook Pro, and wanted to connect my time machine external HD to the mac using a firewire-thunderbolt adaptor.
I did so, but the HD does not show up in the devices menu. Any suggestion?
thank you for your help
Giulio

Have you tried rebooting? If you share what type drive you have, perhaps others will share their experiences. Is your drive bus powered? I haven't had any trouble so far connecting through a TB-FW adapter to my external hard drive (Hitachi drive in an OWC case, bus powered).

Time Capsule external USB drive won't reconnect remotely over Back To My Mac

I'm running a Mac Mini at work, connected via ethernet to an enterprise network (I have no idea what routers they are using, or how they are set up).
At home, I have a MBP laptop and a Time Capsule (hardwired to cable modem) with an external USB drive attached.
All 3 machines (Mac Mini, MBP, TC via Airport Utility) have Back To My Mac switched on.
I can access the external USB drive on my home TC from my work Mac Mini....until the Mini falls asleep. When I wake it back up, the connection back to the TC fails. However....after restarting the Mini, the connection works again.
My first thought was that the corporate network / firewall / etc was causing the problem - not leaving correct ports open, or someting to that effect. However, I realised that if that were the case, restarting the Mini shouldn't help, but it does.
Does anyone have any idea how sleeping breaks being able to access a TC's external drive remotely over BTMM?
The Mac Mini is a 2.3GHz Core i5 with 8GB RAM and plenty of HD space.
The MBP is a 15" late 2013 retina, 2.6 GHz Core i7, 16 GB RAM, also plenty of HD space.
The TC is a 2 TB 4th generation model.
Thanks!
J

Sorry that did not work. This works well for me using Lacie drives, but I haven't tried Iomega.
Have you checked Iomega's site to see if any software/firmware updates available?
Also noticed during a quick search that a number of users are reporting mounting problems with Iomega. Not sure if this applies to you or not.
http://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?search=Go&q=iomegadrive+won%27tmount

Can Time Machine backup USB Drive connected to Airport Extreme Base Station

I need a new N based wireless router. I would prefer to get just the $179 Base Station and not the $299 Time Capsule. I already have a nice external USB 500GB drive that I would connect to the AEBS. So, once I have this new wireless router/base station installed at home and I have the external USB drive connected to it, can my new Macbook Air with a USB connected 400GB drive be used to backup what is on the Macbook Air and also backup the 500GB USB drive info that is connected to the extreme base station?
Thanks
tj

I found this when searching Apple's web site but it is old, October 2007, and said it could not be done. Has this changed since then?
Here is what I found.
Mac OS X 10.5: Time Machine doesn't back up to AirPort Disks
* Last Modified on: October 26, 2007
* Article: 306833
Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard can be used to back up to many kinds of Mac OS Extended-formatted drives, but it does not support AirPort Extreme's AirPort Disk feature.
Time Machine can back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, or to a Leopard Server volume, or an Xsan storage device.

Time machine - ext USB drive - failure

After reformatting & partitioning an external USB drive, I can't get Time Machine to do a back up on it (I've been using TM on several macs, including this one, and this drive, for years). The backup begins and after copying a few GBs of data, I get the message "the backup was not performed because an error occurred while copying files to the backup disk"
I have repaired the disk with Disk Utility, without success. I've erased the disk with Disk Utility & then repaired it. I've restarted many times. I can't see what the problem is.
The mini's internal HD is 320 GB; the external drive is 1TB, in 2-500 GB partitions. One partition is used for TM, the other for a daily SuperDuper backup. The SuperDuper backups are working fine.

As Mr. Ross pointed out above, start Console and check the logs. Find the error message "The backup was not performed because an error occurred while copying files to the backup disk," then look for preceding related errors. In my case I saw a bunch of Disk I/O errors that turned out to be a defective hard disk. Every time the backup got to a specific size (and presumably a specific location on the drive), Time Machine would fail and the disk would occasionally unmount by itself.

Iomega external USB drive not working

Hello, I have a K8n neo4f board, 1.9 bios, AMD64x2 4400. For some strange reason my external USB drive doesn't work with this setup. I get i/o or insufficient resource errors, and the system will hang. This is puzzling since I have plenty of system resources available (2G ram), and my USB inputs work with other devices. I currently have a dvd drive, ir receiver,memory card adapter, and a cordless mouse receiver plugged in. All of these devices work flawlessly. There is nothing wrong with the external drive, it works with my Dell Inspiron 8200 Laptop. Is this a bios issue, should I upgrade to the latest 1b ? I'm hesitant of doing so, because of the horror stories I've read in this forum of systems becoming unuseable. Maybe someone with a similar problem can help me out.

Are you sure this is not software related .
Ref:
https://iomega-eu-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/iomega_eu_en.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=16552&p_sid=7UzKoC4i&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX3NvcnRfYnk9JnBfZ3JpZHNvcnQ9JnBfcm93X2NudD0xOTgmcF9wcm9kX2x2bDE9MyZwX3Byb2RfbHZsMj0zNSZwX2NhdF9sdmwxPTUwJnBfcGFnZT0x&p_li=

Migrating content from an encrypted Time Machine external disk (will not easily work)

I recently purchased an SSHD to upgrade my Mac. I preferred not to completely restore from Time Machine, but rather to install a new copy of Mavericks on the new disk and then migrate my TM content afterwards. At the end of installation, Mavericks proposed the option to migrate data from a TM backup, which I chose.
It turns out that the Migration Assistant did not recognize any disk, perhaps because it was encrypted, nor displayed any way to select the volume and unlock it by entering its password. Despite what Pondini says the Time Machine backups disk was not seen by the Mac: as workaround I had to create a fictitious user, log in, unlock the disk (that was immediately recognized by the system) and then run the Migration Assistant from there (by the way, after 4 hours I finally logged into my migrated account and found out that apps were not imported at all!)
I find all this quite not…applish! I could have preferred to unencrypt the TM disk rather than
Is there anyone facing this same experience? Hope that this, if it's a bug, will be fixed, otherwise I'll have to make a TM backup on a secondary disk (which I don't own so big).

Well a google search would appear that disk utility will show you the disk regardless if it's mounted or unmounted. you're best bet would be to unmount the disk in finder, shut down the computer completely, unplug it from a power source, and then unplug the firewire...
I think this is your safest bet but then again, I'm not that worried about ejecting my disks.
you get no error messages when you right click and eject the disk in in disk utilty? you said you have a my disk, do you mean My Book by western digital? I know that they load software onto the machine for encryption purposes. have you tried ejecting the disk from there? I uninstalled said software so I can't tell you if there is an option for that or not.

External USB Drive Not Shown in Finder... HELP!!!

After upgraded to the latest OS X Lion, external USB drives plugged to my macbook pro (named A) won't show anything. I've tried cmd+opt+r+p twice but no luck; however, i am able to see it in Disk Ultilities and Storage in About This Mac...
Another same macbook pro of mine (named B) did the upgrade and it is working just fine - external drive is shown as normal whenever plugged.
Help please because my daily work depends largely on document on external usb drive!!!???

I've surfed around already before having my problem posted here because it's so frustrated…
AnaMusic: I've tried that but it isn't worked
Eric Ross: it's checked
LexSchellings: I did run "verify disk" and "repair disk" -> but no luck… My hard drive isn't mounted to Lion as shown in status. Is it something to do with NTFS format? I came across some forum and read that Lion is design to natively support NTFS..
Are there any ways around???

Time machine external hard drive in windows not working.

I recently bought a Western Digital external hard drive to use with time machine so that I would have my laptop backed up. When I set up the time machine, it had to format my hard drive, erasing the WD files that were on the drive. I was able to continue using it as an external storage device on the Mac side of my laptop, but when trying to use it on the windows side, it wont show up in My Computer. I'm starting to wonder if I will be unable to use this external drive on anything other than a Mac now that it is set up as my Time Machine.
If that is the case, is there a way that I can reset my drive to not show up as my Time Machine Disk.
Thanks,
JT

If you're going to use the drive on both platforms, does it need to be set up first on the PC, allocating 1/2? to Windows NTFS format, then disable/reset/delete Time Machine backups doing the Mac HFS format thing on remainder of External?
Setup on my Acomdata 7200rpm External is Mac 150GB HFS, Windows 150GB NTFS. On Windows side, is Vista, W7 (32 &64Bit) and recently my daughter's HP Laptop XP which posed a problem until I found that NtBackup.Msi was in VALUEADD folder on the Windows XP install CD. Also available from Microsoft if no install CD. NtBackup makes a .BKF string of the hard drive, runs maybe a little slower than Vista & Windows 7 Backup/Restore Maint. Long time since I restore a .BKF but think it requires an OS - unlike Vista + Windows 7 where the install Disk will retore from External in ~30 minutes.
I have not figured out how to get Leopard restored short of format, then complete (re)install with Time Machine restore kicking in at the end of that process. Takes a great deal of time and some things need fixing after completion. Wondering if Snow Leopard/Disk Utility has any improvements on this score. Refuse to pay for anything that I consider to be intrisically necessary to use of product.

Time Machine external USB drive not available at boot

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