Why won't my external hard drive connect to my mac anymore

I have a 1 Terabyte external HD that I use for my timemachine back ups. I eject it whenever I need to use my laptop away from my desk and re-connect it so it will do an automatic back up. the other day, it would not eject at ALL, so I ended up having to shutdown my laptop and disconnect it. Later, when I went to reconnect it to the laptop, my Mac doesn't recognize it. I have rebooted the laptop and the external hard drive multiple times, but when I plug the HD into the laptop, the Mac still doesn't "sense" it. I can't do any backups at the moment.

From reading similar threads, and from my own experiences, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that:
* the drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journal), not FAT32, NTFS or other
* the drive must not be currently used as a time machine disk
* (theory) the drive must not have previously been used a time machine disk
From my own experiences, I had 3 externals that worked w/ iMovie 11 but not w/ FCP X. With some experimentation, I was able to confirm the above items.
- one drive was a TM disk, and just wasn't ever going to work. Annoying, but at least an identified issue (or bug)
- one drive was once a TM disk but I'd stopped using it as such. I'd manually deleted the backups on it, but suspect that TM likely leaves invisble files around to identify meta on file lists, exclusions, etc. Showing invisibles in finder listed a plethora of files that I wasn't willing to research. Went into disk utility, formatted as Extended Journaled, and the disk started to appear in project and event windows in FCP X.
- one drive was formatted as NTFS. I use Tuxera to read/write NTFS and this seemingly caused no problems in iMovie. With numerous threads discussing FAT32/NTFS incompatability, I opted to format this disk and then restore my old iMovie events and projects. Again, this resulted in the drive being visible in FCP X.
One note, as mentioned above, in the case of the disk wehere I restored old iMovie events/projects, the disk didn't immediately show in the events window (but did show projects immediately). The solution was to insure that the events window was grouping events by disk. The default layout hid away my external disk until I did this--and once grouped properly, I was able to then import my iMovie events into FCP X successfully.
Good luck...the support for exernal drives (and likely NAS) seems really poorly documented. I lost at least two days to this.

Similar Messages

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 external hard drive open

So I downloaded mavericks when it came out and now one of my external hard drives will not open but disk utility Will recognize the hard drive but I cannot access the lights on the hard drive work you can feel it spinning but it just won't access I've tried everything I know the hard drive fine why won't my Mac read my drive?

Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a diagnostic test. It’s unlikely to solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
The purpose of the test is to determine whether the problem is caused by third-party software that loads automatically at startup or login, by a peripheral device, by a font conflict, or by corruption of the file system or of certain system caches.
Disconnect all wired peripherals except those needed for the test, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards, if applicable. Start up in safe mode and log in to the account with the problem. You must hold down the shift key twice: once when you turn on the computer, and again when you log in.
Note: If FileVault is enabled, or if a firmware password is set, or if the startup volume is a software RAID, you can’t do this. Ask for further instructions.
Safe mode is much slower to start up and run than normal, with limited graphics performance, and some things won’t work at all, including sound output and Wi-Fi on certain models. The next normal startup may also be somewhat slow.
The login screen appears even if you usually login automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Test while in safe mode. Same problem?
After testing, restart as usual (not in safe mode) and verify that you still have the problem. Post the results of the test.

Why won't my external hard drive appear in Finder?

I have an Iomega 320GB SPHDU external hard drive which I was using as my backup disk for Time Machine and also to store other files (documents, photos, etc.). I have been using for some time now and never had any problems, however this morning, I plugged the hard drive into my MacBook Pro, which is from early 2011 and on operating system OS X 10.9.4, using the USB ports and the hard drive did not appear in Finder. I checked to see if it had appeared in Disk Utility which it does, but Disk Utility is telling me that the hard drive needs repairing. When I try to repair the hard drive, I get the message 'Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed up files.' As I said I have never had any problems with it before, but this has just occurred this morning and I'm unsure why it has happened.

Because there's a problem with the disk's directory structure; these are often the result of improperly unplugging drives or forcing a computer to shut down. Proceed as instructed, or try using a more powerful utility such as DiskWarrior to repair it.
(111975)

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 in the hard drive list in final cut pro x?

I can't figure out how to get my external hard drive to show up in the list of available drives in final cut pro x. It works just fine in iMovie 11 and every where else on my MacBook pro. The external hard drive I am trying to get to appear is an iomega 1 TB hard drive. Please help as I have a ton of footage on it and don't have the room to move it to my internal drive on the MacBook.

I have the same problem with internal drives. Only the one with the largest free space shows up. The others ”blink” in the Event viewer, and then disappear. Sounds like a bug...
Regards,
Rabbe

Why won't my external hard drive show up in the hard drive list in final cut pro 8?

I can't figure out how to get my external hard drive to show up in the list of available drives in final cut pro x. It works just fine in iMovie 11 and every where else on my MacBook pro. The external hard drive I am trying to get to appear is an iomega 1 TB hard drive. Please help as I have a ton of footage on it and don't have the room to move it to my internal drive on the MacBook.

From reading similar threads, and from my own experiences, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that:
* the drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journal), not FAT32, NTFS or other
* the drive must not be currently used as a time machine disk
* (theory) the drive must not have previously been used a time machine disk
From my own experiences, I had 3 externals that worked w/ iMovie 11 but not w/ FCP X. With some experimentation, I was able to confirm the above items.
- one drive was a TM disk, and just wasn't ever going to work. Annoying, but at least an identified issue (or bug)
- one drive was once a TM disk but I'd stopped using it as such. I'd manually deleted the backups on it, but suspect that TM likely leaves invisble files around to identify meta on file lists, exclusions, etc. Showing invisibles in finder listed a plethora of files that I wasn't willing to research. Went into disk utility, formatted as Extended Journaled, and the disk started to appear in project and event windows in FCP X.
- one drive was formatted as NTFS. I use Tuxera to read/write NTFS and this seemingly caused no problems in iMovie. With numerous threads discussing FAT32/NTFS incompatability, I opted to format this disk and then restore my old iMovie events and projects. Again, this resulted in the drive being visible in FCP X.
One note, as mentioned above, in the case of the disk wehere I restored old iMovie events/projects, the disk didn't immediately show in the events window (but did show projects immediately). The solution was to insure that the events window was grouping events by disk. The default layout hid away my external disk until I did this--and once grouped properly, I was able to then import my iMovie events into FCP X successfully.
Good luck...the support for exernal drives (and likely NAS) seems really poorly documented. I lost at least two days to this.

With an external hard drive connected to my mac , can i have the videos streaming on my hdtv via apple tv?

i have 3TB hard drive where i store all of my HD videos since my macbook pro just cant handle them.
i connect the harddrive to my macbook pro to watch the videos when i need to but do not upload them back to the mac
can apple tv stream the videos to my hdtv when my macbook is connected to the external hard drive?
PLEASE HELP IF SOMEBODY HAS SPECIFICALLY DONE THIS
THANKS

aseemfromnyc wrote:
is it possible to stream the contents of the hard drive to the hdtv witht the hard drive
Yes, add them to iTunes. The fact that they are on an external doesn't stop them from being in iTunes.
If necessary, create a separate library which you just use when you have the external connected.
Alternatively, if you have an iPhone or iPad you could check out an App like Air Video, which displays video that isn't in iTunes on your device. I think you can then use Airplay to get it onto your ATV.

How can I backup an external hard drive connected to my mac with time capsule?

The hard drive on my IMac is 500GBytes. It is just about full. I have purchased an additional drive to attach to it permanently through the Firewire 800 interface. My plan is to move my photographs and iTunes to the attached drive. I currently use 2TB time capsule to backup my hard drive. Can I get time capsule to back up the external hard drive as well?
Thanks,
Herb

Can I get time capsule to back up the external hard drive as well?
I assume that you are asking about Time Machine backups to the Time Capsule here, correct?
Open System Preferences (gear icon on the dock)
Open Time Machine
Click Options
Here, you will see list of items that are excluded from backups. By default, the hard drive attached to your Mac will appear here.
Click on the name of the hard drive to highlight it
Click the - (minus) button to remove the drive from the list of items that are excluded from backups
Now, the drive will be backed up along with your Mac on the next pass that Time Machine makes, and any changes that you make to the hard drive will be backed up as well in the future.

Why won't my external hard drive mount in Disk Utility even when it shows up on the list?

Hey all,
For the last few years I've used a Samsung S2 1TB external harddrive to back up all my files, this includes photos, music and a vast amount of resources required for Uni. However I plugged it in for the first time in about two months and discovered that neither my Macbook Pro (late 2011) or my Mac Mini (early 2013) are able to mount the hard drive.
It shows up in Disk Utilty however the harddrive is greyed out and when I manually try to mount it I get an error message saying that it can't be mounted and to use the first aid 'Repair disk permissions' feature which would be all good and well were that not also greyed out.
I've read a fair amount on this forum that suggest that Mavericks has caused quite an issue with harddrives and although I don't know for sure, the harddrive did stop working at a very similar time to when I updated. I've sinced used the basic version of 'Disk Drill' on the harddrive and all the files show up perfectly which leads me to believe that perhaps the issue isn't with the harddrive itself but perhaps a compatibility issue.
I was just wondering whether anyone had any advice or had suffered a similiar issue, preferably in relation to the Samsung S2 harddrive. The partition type is a Windows_FAT_32 and it's a USB hard drive.
Thanks in advance!

Because there's a problem with the disk's directory structure; these are often the result of improperly unplugging drives or forcing a computer to shut down. Proceed as instructed, or try using a more powerful utility such as DiskWarrior to repair it.
(111975)

Why won't my external hard drive show up in iMovie 11?

My external USB drive - formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) shows up fine on my desktop, and worked fine with iMovie in the past. Now, it won't show up in the event library, or in the "Save to:" menu when I try to import video. I can see my iMovie projects and events on the drive in Finder, but iMovie just doesn't recognize the drive. Argh!!! Any ideas?? Thanks in advance!

Luyen wrote:
Ignore ownership? Yep, it's checked.
although some say it's plain voodoo, but try the Disk Utilitys 'repair permissions' command
You'll find the DU in your applications/utilities Folder ........

How to share external hard drive connected to mac with pc

I have and external hard drive connected to my mac-mini OSX 10.4.11
My iTunes music folder is in it. I want to share my music with my kids in my house so they can hear it in their windows xp computer with windows media player 11
I have the computers connected to a router and I can see the mac files from the pc but I cannot see the external hard drive that is mounted on the desktop of the mac.
The external drive is formatted as "Mac OS Extended (journaled)
Or.... If there is a way that I can duplicate my 80 gigs of music onto the pc that would be great.
I also tried to see the pc from the mac so that I can drag and drop some songs from the iTunes music folder right into the desktop of the pc and I can't get to the pc from the mac. I get an error that says the Alias is incorrect and the PC cannot be accessed.
Please Help my kids are driving me crazy for some music on their computer!
thanks in advance.

Apple has a 'bunch' of articles on sharing iTunes.
Or look at the networking. And then whether you want to put MacDrive on the PC, or use NTFS format and NTFS driver (commercial or free MacFUSE).
And probably want to ask or look in iTunes for Mac and Windows discussions, too.
Most of the things I have (bookmarked) deal with Leopard, not Tiger, so not sure but pretty sure networking is now slightly different.
http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/

My iMac won't recognize my external hard drive connected by FireWire 400

I have an external hard drive connected to my Intel-based iMac through a FireWire 400 cable. The drive doesn't come up on the desktop after turning on the hard drive power.
If I connect through the USB cable, it appears quickly on the desktop. Why isn't this working through FireWire? I had some trouble with this in Tiger as well, but was somehow able to get it to work.

The drive does not appear in Disk Utility.
And I don't think I'll be installing DiskWarrior until Leopards countless bugs are fixed, especially after reading THIS:
Alsoft: There are some DiskWarrior "compatibility issues" with Leopard
After previously stating "you can run the (current version of DiskWarrior under Leopard) knowing no harm will come to the hard drive or to your data," Alsoft has now posted a message to its Web site stating "there are some compatibility issues when running an installed copy of DiskWarrior 4.0 while started up from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Alsoft currently recommends that you do not run DiskWarrior 4.0 while the computer is started from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard."
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071026153956503

Backup an external hard drive connected to Airport -- is this possible?

Currently I have a hub connected to my airport extreme. There are 2 external hard drives connected to the hub. One has my iTunes library on it, and the other is being used for time machine backups.
I have no problem doing the backup wirelessly to the one hard drive. In time machine, I could pick either external drive to back up to. What I am trying to do is back up the external drive too. Time machine is only seeing the hard drive on my laptop. The exclude list is blank and when I try to add the itunes HD to the exclude list (to remove it), it won't let me select it-- it is greyed out.
If I connect the itunes HD directly into my laptop, I can run the backup, but that is not very convenient. Is what I am trying to do possible? Does anyone have any ideas? Are there any other posts discussing this (I could not find any with my specific problem).
Thanks!

nealmay wrote:
Currently I have a hub connected to my airport extreme. There are 2 external hard drives connected to the hub. One has my iTunes library on it, and the other is being used for time machine backups.
I have no problem doing the backup wirelessly to the one hard drive. In time machine, I could pick either external drive to back up to. What I am trying to do is back up the external drive too. Time machine is only seeing the hard drive on my laptop. The exclude list is blank and when I try to add the itunes HD to the exclude list (to remove it), it won't let me select it-- it is greyed out.
That's correct. Time Machine will not back up a network drive (see #2 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum).
You're going to need a different app. Which one will depend on where you want the backups to go; some apps will not back-up from a network drive; others won't back up to a network drive. I don't know, offhand, of any that will do both. Perhaps Kappy, V.K., or others will.
For backups to a local disk, try either CarbonCopyCloner (which I use to make a full bootable "clone" in addition to Time Machine), and I think SuperDuper will do this as well. CCC is donationware, so you can try it for a while, then send them some $$ so they can keep it current. It can be scheduled to run automatically, and you have the choice of it keeping only current copies or to archive prior versions as well. SuperDuper has a free version, but you need the paid one (about $30) to do scheduling. I don't know if it will keep archive copies.
There are many other backup apps, some of which will handle network drives. Check Google, VersionTracker.com, or MacUpdate.com.

IMovie Won't Recognize External Hard Drive...?

Hello,
Yesterday, I upgraded to a new Macbook Pro using OSX 10.9.4 (Mavericks) and I'm working with iMovie 10.0.2.
On my old Macbook, I had an external hard drive which held all of my raw video footage, and instead of filling my hard drive with iMovie Projects and videos, I just kept them saved on the hard drive and edited projects from that.
Theoretically, this should be possible with this newest version of iMovie, right? However, when I open iMovie, I cannot find the hard drive. It is connected to my computer, and I can see and access it on the desktop, but there is no "Devices" icon listed in iMovie. Isn't it supposed to automatically display? I have two external hard drives, both formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and I tried both of them, but why don't they display in iMovie?
Is this a strange problem or am I just completely missing something really basic........? I've looked online, and it seems like they should display automatically.
I'm stumped and am totally unfamiliar with this version of iMovie.
Thanks so much for your help!

It might be really basic, but what was the solution? It eludes me....
== ==
Okay, quick edit, the answer is to double click on the .imovielibrary file you want to import. I still think that is not obvious, you'd think there was something you could do inside iMovie that would work, or, that it should simply recognize it automatically...

Why won't my external hard drive connect to my mac anymore

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for