How to Identify Physical External Hard Drives that Show in Finder?

I have a number of firewire hard drives hooked up to my Mac Pro. The 800s are daisy chained together, as are the 400s. I have gone into System Profiler to see if their serial numbers show, but they don't. Is there a simple way of selecting one of the hard drives in the finder and seeing some clue or indicator of which hard drive it is in the stack of physical hard drives? Or, is it necessary to hook just one up at a time to see which it is in the finder? Is there some software that lets you identify a physical hard drive as a particular one in the finder?
Thanks.

"... and add FW800 controller" was in there for you, for now.
I consider that the best answer to daisy-chaining along with the problems that arise such as yours and others trying to do the same.

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I have an external hard drive that shows up in disk utility but Verify and Restore are greyed out. I am trying to determine what is wrong with the drive.
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Disk Description : WD Elements 1023 Media                      Total Capacity : 500.11 GB (500,105,740,288 Bytes)
Connection Bus : USB                                                               Write Status : Read/Write
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Hello,
I have just experienced the same thing!
Although my external drive shows in Disk Utility, it does not show in Finder.
And the Verify/Repair buttons are also greyed out.
Also, although the drive is 2TB. DU shows it as having Total Capacity of only 4.14GB! (Which should be the Free Space).
I was wondering if you solved your problem, & if so, would you share your solution.
I´m afraid to Erase in case I lose all my Data on the drive.
Thanks in advance for your reply!

How do I access an external hard drive that shows up in Disk Utility but will not show up in finder or on my desktop?

I have an external hard drive that just stopped showing up one day. Is there a solution to this problem that allows me to secure the data on the drive before reformatting?

I'm having the same problem bpay14, but with a CalDigit VR2 6TB RAID0 external hard drive.
One day it was showing on my desktop, the other it wasn't. And I still didn't update my Mavericks to 10.9.3 (still with the 10.9.2).
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I would be eternally grateful!
Thanks in advance!!!
Cheers!

External Hard drive not showing on finder or desktop

My hard drive is only a week old and was working fine until i plugged it in today. The hard drive light still lights up when plugged in and it works when i plug it into a tv and my roommates pc.
However on my macbook the hard drive won't show up in finder or the desktop... it shows in disk utility but options to verify disk etc are 'greyed out' so i can't click on them. THere isn't anything wrong with the hard drive because as stated above it worked on other devices.
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Same problem here. Sometimes drives disappear completely from the Finder sidebar. Sometimes they just gray out. Quick 'n' easy fix: In Terminal, type:
chflags nohidden /Volumes/MY_PARTITION
(where MY_PARTITION is the name of the drive you can't find).
For the UNIX impaired, if there's a space in your drive name, you can use "\ " to represent the space (no quotes, just the backslash and the space). So for example, Macintosh HD would be typed:
Macintosh\ HD

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Welcome to Apple Support Communities
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External Hard Drive not showing in finder

Hi,
I have done an unsafe eject two weeks ago of my external hd. When I try to connect the hd again it doesn't show in finder. I've tried the disk utility but that doesn't work. Are there any other ways to get the hd working again?

I had this problem a few days ago…
I solved using the following steps:
1) Disconnect the external HD from everything, including power.
2) Shut down the Mac.
3) Reboot the Mac from the Installer disc.
4) Run Disc Utility, first "Repair Disc" then "Repair Permissions" on the internal HD (which actually threw up a total of 4 errors).
5) Restart the Mac from the internal HD.
6) Reconnect the external HD.
At this point, mine connected perfectly and enabled me to run Time Machine.
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Here is the results of Terminal Query:
/dev/disk0
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Thank you for responding.
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Hello Sandra,
The article linked below details how to go about restoring items from Time Machine in Snow Leopard.
Mac OS X 10.6: Recovering items using Time Machine and Spotlight
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH6379
Sincerely,
Allen

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WHile you can do it that way, the next time you back up you'll end up copying the entire library again, and,as you'l see, once a library gets bigger that can take a considerable amount of time.
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How to Identify Physical External Hard Drives that Show in Finder?

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