Mac Drive Not Showing Up In Windows
Most of the time, when you connect an external hard drive to your Mac’s USB port, you soon see it mount on the desktop. Apple likes to ensure these are easy to find, so they also appear in the Finder in the left-hand column under Devices, since Mac’s treat them the same way as another computer.However, sometimes, an external drive doesn't show up. It’s annoying, especially when you need to transfer something right then.
How to Open an External Drive Not Showing on Mac. Drive or SSD might not be showing up. It may have been formatted incorrectly, it may be corrupted, it may have a faulty (or inadequate) cable. Power up the computer and you'll likely see that the new hard drive is still not showing up. Your new drive is not dead. To get the hard drive to show up, you must first initialize it. Initialize the new hard drive. Go to the start menu and click on Disk Management.
And besides, there can be a risk that data on the external USB pen, hard, or flash drive is corrupt, which means you can’t transfer what you need between devices at all.Corrupt data can be one reason your Mac won't recognize an external drive, but there are other reasons too. Ccc study material in hindi pdf. Let’s take a look why this is happening and how you can get an external drive to appear on your Mac and get recover data to access to your documents.How to fix an external disk drive that won't show up on a MacWhy an external disk drive is not showing up? There could be a few reasons why an external hard or flash drive isn’t making an appearance.Start with the basics:. Check whether the drive is properly plugged in. It sounds obvious, but since this relies on a wire - either a USB cable or HDMI cable - if it’s not connected properly then it won’t appear on your desktop.
Faulty cable. Assuming it’s plugged in correctly, not wobbly or loose, the cable could be at fault.
Try connecting the same device with a different cable. Damaged USB or flash drive port. It could be a hardware issue with the Mac. If you’ve got another port, try connecting the device to that one.
Reboot your Mac. Sometimes, if a disk won't boot, the cause is macOS issue. Hopefully, some data damage that can be fixed by restarting. Choose the Apple menu Restart.
Or press and hold the power button and, when a dialog box appears, click the Restart or press R. Restarting your Mac essentially clears your macOS’s memory and starts it up fresh. Incorrectly formatted drive. Not every drive is optimized for Macs. It could be that you are trying to connect something only fit to interact with Windows devices. If you’ve got a PC or laptop, it’s worth connecting and seeing if you can access the files through another device.
The best way to look for an incorrectly formatted drive is to go toApple (in the top toolbar menu) About This Mac Storage.See if the external drive shows up here. For more information, go to the same menu option, then select System Report.
Mac Hard Drive Not Showing Up Windows 10
Mac not formatted to display external drives on the desktop. It could be that your Mac already recognizes the device, but just isn’t showing its icon on the desktop screen. Even if that is the case, the drive will still appear in the left-hand column of the Finder menu under Devices. You should be able to access your drive that way, and, in the Finder menu under Preferences General, you can check External Drives to ensure that from now on it shows up on your desktop too. Reset NVRAM. To do this, shut down or restart your Mac, switch it back on and immediately press these four keys together for at least 20 seconds: Option, Command, P, and R.
It should look as though your Mac has started again; if it has, release the keys when you hear the second startup chime. Hopefully, the hard drive has shown up now. Check Apple’s Disk Utility to see if an external drive is showing up.
Disk Utility is within System Preferences, or you can find it using Spotlight. If it is visible, then click the option to Mount, which should make it visible on the desktop and in the External Drives option in the Finder menu.Unfortunately, if none of those options has worked and the external drive still isn’t visible, then it could have crashed, or be well and truly broken. But there might still be a way you can.
How to show connected devices in Finder. Go to the Finder menu and select Preferences (Cmd+comma).
From General tab tick External disks to ensure that from now on it shows on the desktop.In the Sidebar tab you can choose which folders and devices will be shown in the left-hand column of the Finder window.How to add cloud to FinderYou can also mount cloud storage as local drive on your Mac. By connecting Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon to your computer, you get more space for securely accessing and sharing files. For your ease, add cloud drives to Finder with CloudMounter app, so that you keep them close at hand. You can read detailed instructions on managing cloud storage as local drives. Repair the failed external drives with First AidIf your drive is having problems, you can try to fix them yourself with First Aid and therefore get access to your files.
First Aid tool will check the disk for errors and then attempt a repair as needed. It helps to verify and repair a range of issues related to startup HD and external drive problems. If you are able to fix the hard drive or SSD in your Mac (or an external drive) using Disk Utility you will hopefully be able to recover your files.To run Fist Aid on an external hard drive:. Open Disk Utility. You can searching for it using Spotlight Search or via Finder Application Utility. Check on your external hard drive, click the First Aid tab and select Run to start running diagnostics.If First Aid successful in fixing errors, the external drive should be available to mount.
If the utility unable to repair issues, your drive truly is broken or formatted using a file system that the Mac cannot read - in this way we suggest you follow the next steps to recover data from a damaged disk drive. How to recover data from a crashed hard driveThankfully, there is an app for that. Is the world’s premier data recovery software for Mac OS X. Powerful enough to retrieve long-lost, mistakenly deleted files from Macs, external hard drives and USB drives and camera cards. An easy way to recover lost files on an external hard driveProviding you already have version, which you can get automatically by downloading from Setapp:.
Connect your drive to the Mac. Quit all other applications on the Mac, especially those that may be trying to access the external drive (e.g.
IPhoto, Words). Launch. Click on the external drive that you are trying to recover files from. If it has partitions, you will see all of them.
If, however, you still don’t see any volume to the external drive then you may need to try some of the steps above again or read the Disk Drill Scanning FAQs. To avoid the external drive being accessed during the recovery process, click Extras next to the drive or drive partition or file, then select Remount Volume As Read Only. A padlock will appear, protecting the drive during the process. Now click Rebuild (or Recover) next to the file(s) you are trying to recover. Once the scan is finished - it may take some time if the files are large - a list of files will appeal. Next, click Mount Found Items as Disk button on the bottom-left below the scan results.
Disk Drill “strongly suggest saving the files to a different drive than the one you are trying to recover files from. Saving to the same drive substantially lowers your chances of recovery.”. A drive icon will appear, which once you double click will give you the option to open the files as you would do before they were lost.
Disk Not Showing Up Windows
Drag them to another location, such as your desktop or a folder on your Mac. Open the files to ensure they have been recovered properly and safely eject the external drive.Disk Drill does have other ways to recover lost files but assuming there aren’t complications, this method is the most effective. Disk Drill Pro recovery app is, along with dozens of Mac apps that will make your life easier. Never have to worry about a crashed or corrupted external drive again. A few more tips on getting your files back. Macs and third-party apps that look after Macs, such as and come with a S.M.A.R.T. (also known as Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) status monitor.
If a SMART check reports errors, then it could mean the hard drive is at risk of failing completely. Within Disk Utility and Disk Drill, there are several solutions for this: Repair Disk Permissions and Repair Disk. If neither work, it’s recommended that you backup all of the data from the disk, erase, then run a SMART check again. The external hard drive should show up as Verified. Partitions can get lost within hard drives, temporarily hiding all of the information contained within. Disk Drill can help to identify and restore this information.
Within Disk Drill, you can restore data when a hard drive is damaged or add formatting, which is also something Disk Utility can help with., another useful app available from Setapp, can help you identify external hard drive errors and repair them. It is an essential tool worth trying when you’re having external hard drive difficulties.
Alternative ways to recover data from an external hard driveReset the System Management Controller (SMC) if your Mac shuts down when you plug in an external hard drive. Then use a different port to connect the external hard drive. If you’ve got a battery that you can’t remove:. Shut down and unplug the power adapter.
Press Shift-Control-Option and the power button at the same time. Do this for 10 seconds. Release all keys. Plug the power adapter back in and switch your Mac back onFor Macs with removable batteries, you need to switch them off, remove the battery, then press and hold the power button for 5 seconds.
After that, put the battery back in, plug in the power adapter and switch the power on again.What’s your file format? One reason your Mac isn’t recognizing the hard drive is the file format. Windows uses NTFS file formats, while Macs, up until the introduction of Sierra, have used HFS+. Now, Apple has introduced the Apple File System (APFS) for newer operating systems. It is possible to format a hard drive so it can be read on Mac and Windows computers, providing you format using exFAT.
However, if you’re having problems accessing the files and the issue is due to formatting, you will need to connect it to a device it can be read on, and then format the files correctly for the computer you are going to use it on next. How to make Ext2/Ext3 drives readable on MacThe common issue is Ext2- and Ext3-formatted drives are not readable on macOS. There are two ways to access such external drives on your Mac – via Linux OS or FUSE system. The easiest would be installing Linux to a secondary drive or virtual machine.If you go with Linux installation, dual boot your Mac with Linux on another drive and use FAT32 as a transfer intermediary. If you don’t have a drive to install Linux to, use virtual machine as an interface for it. Transferring can be done the same way – with FAT32, or via network.Another option for reading Ext2/Ext3 disks is mounting disk with Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE).
Basically, it works as an extra interface enabling file system access via specially installed modules.
The Most Common Reason Your Disk Is MissingYou grabbed a nice big hard disk on sale, you cracked open your computer case, plugged the drive into the motherboard and power supply with the appropriate cables (no? Better double check that before you keep reading), and when you booted your computer back up the new hard drive was nowhere to be found.RELATED:Or maybe you followed along with and can’t figure out why, even though you can hear the disk whirring away in the enclosure, you don’t see the disk in Windows. What’s the deal?Unlike the hard drive that ships with an off-the-shelf computer or external drive, extra hard drives you purchase aren’t always shipped formatted and ready to use.
Instead, they’re in a totally blank state–the idea is that the end user will do what they wish with the drive, so there is no benefit to preformatting or otherwise changing the drive at the factory.As such, when you put the drive in your system, Windows simply waits for you to decide what to do with the drive instead of automatically formatting and adding it to the drive list. If you’ve never added a hard drive to your computer before, however, it can be pretty disconcerting when it appears like the drive is missing (or, worse, dead). Have no fear, though! It’s easy to bring your hard drive out of hiding. How to Bring Your Missing Drive OnlineAssuming that the hard drive is installed properly, and is not, (by some horrible dumb luck) defective out of the gate, bringing it online is a very simple process.
To do so, you first need to pull up the Windows Disk Management tool.Press Windows+R on your keyboard to launch the Run dialog box. Type diskmgmt.msc into the box and press Enter.Before we proceed, we want to appropriately scare you: Do not play around in Disk Management. Although the task we’re about to perform is very straightforward and simple to do, if you muck around with this tool you will have a very bad time. Double check every step. Make sure you’re selecting the correct disk, or you can lose lots of data. Below.In Disk Management, scroll down through the list of disks in the bottom pane. These disks will be labeled “Disk 1” through however many disks you have.
Windows assigns a number to all hard disks, solid state disks, USB drives, and card readers, so don’t be surprised if you have to scroll down a bit–in our case the new drive was “Disk 10” as seen below.There are four bits of information here that indicate we’re looking at the right disk. First, the disk is marked as “unknown” and “Not initialized” on the left, which a brand new disk introduced to the system would be flagged as. Second, the drive size matches the size of the drive we just installed (around 1 TB), and the drive is flagged as “unallocated”, which means none of the hard drive space has been formatted or assigned a partition.Right click on the name portion of the disk entry, where it says “Disk #”, and select “Initialize Disk” from the right-click context menu.RELATED:In the first step of the initilization process, you’ll be prompted to choose whether you want to use a Master Boot Record (MBR) or a GUID Partition Table (GPT) for the partition style of your disk. If you want to do some in depth reading before making a choice, you can. In short, unless you have a pressing reason to use MBR, use GPT instead–it’s newer, more efficient, and offers more robust protection against corruptions of the boot record.Click “OK” and you’ll be returned to the main Disk Management window. There you’ll find that your disk is now labeled “Basic” and “Online” on the left, but the contents are still “unallocated”.
Right click on the striped box presenting the unallocated drive space. Select “New Simple Volume”.This will launch the New Simple Volume Wizard to guide you through the process of setting up the disk. In the first step, select how much space you want to include in the volume. By default the number is the full amount of available disk space–unless you’re planning on reserving space for additional partitions, there’s no reason to change this. Click “Next”.In the second step, assign a drive letter. The default is probably fine.RELATED:Finally, format the volume.
If you’re using the volume for routine computing tasks (storing photos, video games, etc.) there’s no real need to deviate from the default NTFS file system and settings. Curious about the differences between file systems and why you might use the different options? Give your volume a name, click “Next”, and wait for the format process to finish.When the process is complete, you’ll see your new drive–allocated, formatted, and ready for action–in the Disk Management disk list.You can now use the disk like any other on your system for media storage, games, and other purposes.