IMac Won't Read External Hard Drive

I have an iomega external hard drive which has been working well as backup. My imac (10.7.2) inexplicably crashed and when I rebooted it longer would read the external hard drive. I get the message "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" with the options: initialize.... /ignore/eject. I think that when the imac crashed, the disk wasn't properly ejected. I tried using disk utlity to repair the disk but that failed. Any advice? I have a lot of videos and pictures on the external disk.....

It sounds like your drive directory has been corrupted.
DiskWarrior may be able to rebuild your drive directory. I have had success with DiskWarrior in similar circumstances.
If DiskWarrior fails to restore your drive, then, you are looking at data recovery.
Data Rescue may recover your files. You will need a drive of the same size to copy over your files.
If Data Rescue fails, then, your last resort is professional data recovery services.

Similar Messages

IMAC won't recognize external hard drive anymore

I am running snow leopard on my IMAC with all the latest software updates. I've been using a LaCie Quadra external hard drive with time machine for backups for awhile with no problems. From the beginning is was plug in the hard drive and go, the mac recognized it. Now, suddenly, it won't. When I turn on the LaCie to back up, the icon no longer pops on the desktop. It is also not listed in the Time Machine preferences anymore. I tried to open the LaCie from Mac systems preferences and get a message with something like "64 bit cannot recognize 32 bit" I am asked to close and reopen system preferences, which would change to 32 bit. I tried that and it did not work,and a report was sent to Apple. Has anyone else been experiencing this? Thanks

jraguseo wrote:
Thanks. I don't disconnect the drive, only turn it off with it's own power switch. According to LaCie, this should not be a problem.
No, it's not a problem for the drive, but neither is leaving it (and Time Machine) on. Most externals will "spin down" after a few minutes of activity, but even if they don't, modern drives are built to run 24/7.
Time Machine was designed to do quick hourly backups of changes, and will protect you best that way. Just leave both Time Machine and the drive on; they'll be fine.

10.9.5 won't read external hard drives

I just updated my imac with OS X 10.9.5 and now I can not read two of my three external hard drives although I was able to read them just fine before
the update. The one I can read is dedicated as my Time Machine; it is a WD My Passport 1 tb drive that I don't believe is formatted in FAT32. The other
two hard drives are NTFS formatted but I installed Tuxera to enable translation (based on another Apple forum) and it has worked great. I can read all of these external hard drives on my macbook air and my other imac at home so it is not the hard drives or cables themselves. Its possible that Tuxera may not read on this new OS version; my recollection is that Western Digital places their own version of Tuxera on the hard drive to enable translation.
Under Finder I do not see the hard drives under "Devices". I do see the hard drive in Disk Utility but the name of the drive that appears beneath the drive description is grayed out. I tried Mounting the drive but it did not work. I tried "verify disk" but it does not work. Any suggestions that could help me read these drives once again would be most appreciated!
thanks much

This procedure is a diagnostic test. It makes no changes to your data.
Please triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
ls -@ORaen /S*/L*/E*/AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext | pbcopy
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.
Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear below what you entered.
The output of the command will be automatically copied to the Clipboard. If the command produced no output, the Clipboard will be empty. Paste into a reply to this message.
The Terminal window doesn't show the output. Please don't copy anything from there.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.

Mac Mini won't read external hard drive

Hello, I have an external Toshiba hard drive and my Mac Mini will not read it. It was originally used on Windows. I plugged the hard drive into my Macbook and it worked as a read-only device. I can take stuff off of it but can not write stuff onto it on my Macbook. I want to use it so I can back up files on my Mac Mini, but it will not read it. I know I have to format it to make it writable with Mac, but I want to make it a read only device on my Mac Mini because I want to back up all the data already on it and my Mac Mini has 400gb of its hard drive available. How can I get my Mac Mini to read the Hard Drive?

If the drive has more than one interface (USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, eSATA), try one of the other interfaces.
Check that the data cable is securely inserted at both ends.
Try a different cable.
If you're connecting the drive through a hub, connect it directly to a built-in port on the Mac.
If you're connecting it directly, try a different port.
Disconnect all other devices on the bus, or as many as possible.
Test the drive with another Mac. Test another drive with this Mac.
If the drive is bus-powered, but has an AC adapter, connect the adapter.
Boot into Recovery and launch Disk Utility. Is the drive recognized?
Start up in Safe Mode and test.
Reset the System Management Controller
If the drive doesn't work under any of the above conditions, and if another drive does work with the same Mac, then the drive has failed. You may be able to salvage the mechanism by removing it from the enclosure and installing it in another one, or in a drive dock.

10.9.3 won't read external hard drives

I recently installed 10.9.3 and now two of my portable external hard drives - one from Seagate and one from Toshiba - will not show up when I plug them in via USB. My MacBook Pro that isn't updated reads them just fine.

Disconnect both EHD's then reset the SMC and PRAM following the directions https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3603. These restarts may need 2-3 attemps before working.

IMac won't recognise external hard drive

My iMac with OSX 10.8.4 won't recognise my external disk drive via either Firewire or USB Cable. It also doesn't show up on desktop or in Disk Utility. Disk drive and cables work fine with my old computer on Snow Leopard. It also wouldn't recognise my old computer via Firewire, when I tried to migrate info across to it (this was before updating system to 10.8.4). However, flash drives show up fine. Any suggestions?

The EHD is a 2.5" WD SATA
Two things:
1) WD drives are fine. It's their enclosures that are useless. I had a desktop WD drive that was nothing but trouble with an older PPC Mac and a newer Intel iMac. Stalled, overheated, and generally made it impossible to use Time Machine.
I ripped the WD bare drive from the enclosure and dropped it in an OWC Mercury Elite Pro and now the WD drive that apparently was the Devil's Own is working flawlessly.
2) Drives that must get all their power from the USB cable can fail to be recognized. As electric motors wear, they can demand more powr. Eventually they need more power than any USB port can provide.
Always get a desktop drive for a desktop computer. Having suffered through serveral "Name-brand" external drives, I now spend the extra money for the OWC products. They are made for Mac and very reliable.
Possible fixes for your old drive:
1) First, make sure the computer is set to "see" the drive. By default, it is not. While in the Finder, open Finder Preferences and make sure "External Disks" is checked:
2) Reformat it as "Macintosh Extended (Journaled)" with Disk Utility. That often wakes up the drive.
3) Get a POWERED USB hub. It makes up the power the drive can't get from teh port.

I made a bootable disc on an external hard drive, with Yosemite on it. I am running Snow Leopard on my iMac. How can I open the Yosemite disc from the desktop on my iMac? Does the external hard drive need to be connected to my iMac by firewire to

I made a bootable disc on an external hard drive, with Yosemite on it. I am running Snow Leopard on my iMac. How can I open the Yosemite disc from the desktop on my iMac? Does the external hard drive need to be connected to my iMac by firewire to do that?

kahjot wrote:
Snow Leopard's Startup Disk pref can’t see Yosemite volumes. So the only way to switch from Snow Leopard to Yosemite is to do what Niel mentioned. Doesn't matter whether it's connected by USB or Firewire, although performance via FW would be faster.
Are you saying that Yos/10.10, as a volume located in a mounted external drive won't appear as an option in Snow Leopard's Startup Disc, in Sys Prefs? I've never heard this one before. AFAIK any mounted volume, regardless of OS, should appear there. I would think that, if it appears in the Boot Picker/Startup Manager it would also appear and could be booted to from Snow's Startup Disk. I can't test this myself, since I don't have Yos. Is what you are saying documented somewhere?

Why won't my external hard drive mount?

Hi
I am having problems getting my new iMac to recognise an external hard drive. It is a 40gb Western Digital hard drive that I copied over photos and music from my old computer (not an Apple) on. When I plug it in to the USD port it recognises the hard drive but then drops it after about 2 minutes and then it won't recognise it again until I restart the computer at which point it recognises it again for 2 minutes.
The hard drive work's fine on my Thinkpad and my Dell desktop.
Can anyone help?
Thanks.

It doesn't make sense.
Anyway, I found the solutions. Download software for solving this problem.
Here is the link:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g

Why won't my external hard drive show up anywhere? Something wrong abt NTFS.

Why won't my external hard drive show up anywhere? Something wrong abt NTFS. After my OS turn to OS X Lion, this problem occur. I couldn't solve it, anybody?

It doesn't make sense.
Anyway, I found the solutions. Download software for solving this problem.
Here is the link:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g

Why won't my iMac 27" boot from external hard drive?

I have a new 27in Intel i5 dual core 3.6GHz iMac. It works wonderfully.
My question is this. I have a Pleides Ice Cube external hard drive with a USB 2.0/Firewire enclosure with a 500GB hard drive. I used diskutility to format the hard drive as a GUID Partition Table. I then used SuperDuper to clone the iMac OS 10.6.7 and Apps over to it.
I can select the external drive in System Preferences/Startup Disk to boot from, but when booting the iMac gets as far as the white screen then just stops loading.
I have tried both the USB connection and the Firewire connection (with a Firewire 800 to 400 cable).
I have run Disk Utility and repaired the disk and the preferences.
I have used Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory as well, but the iMac will not boot from the drive.
It does boot from the original DVD's and its own hard drive.
My old 24" iMac had no trouble booting from this hard drive or any of the others I have collected over the years, so I am reluctant to think it is the external drive. It is something to do with this particular processor Snow Leopard and external drives.

It sounds like something in the SuperDuper clone might not have copied well. To get the full answer on that I would check with Apple or SuperDuper to see if they support each other.
As a quick test, if you restart and immediately press and hold "option" on your keyboard do you see your external HD as an option to boot from? If so, click it and see if the boot runs any differently, but if you don't see it at all that could show that the problem is more deep rooted.
Personally, if looking in to either of those didn't give me any other info to go on, I would reformat and start the clone again. BTW, do you know for sure GUID Partition is the format you'd want to do this on? Generally macs use "Mac OS Extended" and some external HDs can use "FAT32" (if you want them to work well with Windows)
Hope that gives a little direction
Alex

Time Machine Won't Recognize External Hard Drive

Hi there,
My father has a 2009 iMac running Mac OS X 10.8.3. Recently, Time Machine stopped recognizing his external Maxtor OneTouch backup hard drive.
I've tried the whole litany of ideas and tips listed in this forum and other websites:
Rebooting both the desktop and the external hard drive
Changing USB ports
Checking Disk Utility (won't even display)
Can you offer any solutions? He hasn't had an issue before, so it seems to be an isolated incident. This desktop is for his business, so it's very important for the files to be backed up.
Thanks.
Update: After submitting this, I received a dialogue box that said the computer cannot read the external hard drive.

If the drive has more than one interface (USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, eSATA), try one of the other interfaces.
Check that the data cable is securely inserted at both ends.
Try a different cable.
If you're connecting the drive through a hub, connect it directly to a built-in port on the Mac.
If you're connecting it directly, try a different port.
Disconnect all other devices on the bus, or as many as possible.
Test the drive with another Mac. Test another drive with this Mac.
If the drive is bus-powered, but has an AC adapter, connect the adapter.
Boot into Recovery and launch Disk Utility. Is the drive recognized?
Start up in Safe Mode and test.
Reset the System Management Controller
If the drive doesn't work under any of the above conditions, and if another drive does work with the same Mac, then the drive has failed. You may be able to salvage the mechanism by removing it from the enclosure and installing it in another one, or in a drive dock.

My iMac won't read my flash drive

My iMac 27-inch, mid 2011, (OS X version 10.7.4) won't read my flash drives. I don't believe it is a formatting issue of the USB flash drive because the flash drives are easily read on my MacBook Air, 11-inch, late 2010 (OS X version 10.7.4). The drive occasionally will appear on the iMac, but not always, and I can't seem to figure out when it does and when it doesn't. When I use an external hard drive, it appears in the finder. Just, not the flash drives. So, I continually have to load from the flash drive to the Air and then connect to the iMac. It's kind of ridiculous. Does anyone have an idea why I can't read the flash drive on the iMac?

Could be a USB port glitch/problem - try these two troubleshooting methods:
PRAM reset:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
SMC reset:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
post back if it still doesn't work.

Imac no longer recognizes external hard drive

my iMac no longer recognizes my external hard drive. An icon used to be on my desktop, at times it would disappear and come back, but it has remained elusive for the past couple of months and is NOWHERE to be found. It doesn't even show up in the Disk Utiity. I need my files!

Please Google, "Intel iMac SMC Reset" and follow the instructions. If the drive is OK this may solve it.

Brand New iMac 24" internal or external hard drive upgrade to 1TB?

I just purchased a brand new iMac 24" MB325LL with a 320GB hard drive. I currently have 432GB of data on my PC and I would like to upgrade the hard drive to 1TB. I have 2 options and I need your advice:
Option #1 » Cost:CDN*$255*
Buy a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB from DirectCanada.com for CDN$155 (tax+shipping included). Get it installed by a certified Apple technician for CDN$100 in Toronto. I doubt I can get it installed for a lower fee.
Option #2 » Cost:CDN*$317*
Buy a LaCie D2 1TB external hard drive with Firewire 800 for CDN$317 (tax+shipping included) either from a U.S. retailer (e.g. iUnitek) or a Canadian one. Prices at Canadian online retailers start from CDN$266 + CDN$37 (13% tax) + CDN$18 (shipping) = CDN$321, which is just CDN$4 more than in the States, taking into account the exchange rate.
So, there you. From the financial point of view, the incentive is to get an internal hard drive, which I don't mind at all. I'd like to install Vista on a 30-40GB partition, if that makes a difference. If I were to get an external hard drive, I would keep all of my data (e.g. music, movies, documents, music, etc) on it and reserve the internal 320GB hard drive for system files and OS.
What would justify paying a premium for an external hard drive other than portability? If I were to get one, I would need to be able to access it not only from my iMac's Vista partition, but also from my HP Vista laptop. Same applies to the internal hard drive. If I were to get a Samsung F1, I would still need to access my mac files from Vista's partition (when I boot into Vista) as well as from my HP Vista laptop (over wi-fi). FYI: I have no use for Time Machine, since I've never deleted a file which I needed to recover..well, maybe once or twice. What I DO need is a utility to synchronize files across machines. Hence, I will need some kind of program to automatically sync my iMac files with my HP laptop files. Currently, I utilize SyncBackSE to sync files between my HP laptop and my PC over Wi-Fi every morning at 6am. Works like a charm.
That's my dilemma in a nutshell. Any comments, suggestions and words of wisdom are welcome.
P.S. I'm also planning on upgrading RAM to 4GB. Newegg.ca is running a promotion (http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227251): $72 CDN minus $20 USD mail-in rebate. It's not related to my question in any way, but some Canadians might find this info relevant.

Well, I don't have the budget for both and as I've already pointed out, Time Machine does not address my needs. It's a great backup solution, but what I need is a synchronization solution. I need to have the same versions of basic files, such as music, photos, documents, and other miscellaneous stuff on my iMac and my HP Vista laptop. Even if I were to get a MacBook in the future, I would still need the same set-up. That way, if something happens to either my iMac or my MacBook, I would always be able to simply copy-paste files from one machine to another. That's, sort of, my version of a perfect backup solution...unless, there's an option to load up files from a Time Machine backup onto a separate one (e.g. MacBook). In the end, Time Machine only partially addresses my need in keeping 2 machines backed up in a sense that it only backs up one of them. My solution kills 2 birds with one stone. I would have 2 syncronized computers (e.g. iMac + HP Laptop, iMac + MacBook) AND both computers would serve as mutual backup sources, since whatever happens to one of them, I would always be able to copy data from the other.
The problem arises when I factor in the sheer number of gigabytes required on the portable computer to mirror everything from the iMac, whether be it a Windows laptop or a MacBook. I would always have more data on my iMac than the available space on a smaller hard drive. I now have 432GB of stuff and I can presume that this number will only grow. Hence, at any given time I would be able to synchronize only the most essential files to the laptop. Ideally, I would need a NAS which would collect = synchronize data from both machines. That way, whenever files get modified, changes would automatically be transferred to the NAS and routed further down the chain to the iMac. It would work both ways, obviously. In that scenario, I don't need to worry about any of the computers, since whichever one fails on me, I would always have a copy of the entire collection of files. Now, that I doubt Time Machine can accomplish.

IMac Finder cannot see external hard drive but Disk Utility can

I have a WD external hard drive and it has been attached to my iMac for a year or two. About two months ago I upgraded to Lion 10.7.5 and hard drive still worked. Then suddenly about a week ago the iMac no longer sees the external hard drive in Finder.
I have connected the hard drive to the iMac with different USB cables and into different ports and it makes no difference so deduce there is no issues with the cables or the ports. I have connected the hard drive to an old Macbook and it can see the harddrive and read some of the info but I really need the hard drive attached to the iMac as I store all my music and photos on the external hard drive.
I read another thread and someone asked if you can see the hard drive in Disk Utility. I tried this and Disk Utility can see the hard drive.
What does this mean? Any suggestions as to how to get the iMac to see the hard drive so I can access the data on it?
I dont really know how Disk Utility works therefore if that is any help to me.
thanks

Open the Finder.
From the Finder menu bar click Finder > Preferences then select the General tab.
Make sure: External disks is selected.

IMac Won't Read External Hard Drive

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