- Mac Doesn't Recognize External Drive
- Mac Won't Recognize Hard Drive
- Mac Won't Mount External Drive
- Pc Won't Recognize External Hard Drive
- External Hard Drive Won't Mount
- Hard Drive Won't Mount Mac
- Mac Won't Recognize External Drive
Summary: In this article, we will provide you 7 useful solutions to the issue of Toshiba external hard drives not showing up on Mac. Besides, we will also tell you how to recover lost data from the Toshiba external hard drive with free Mac data recovery software - iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
'Toshiba external hard drive not showing up on Mac' is a frequently discussed question in Apple support community. Here's an example.
- External storage is attacked by virus. One of the major reasons that your external hard drive not mounting on Mac is the virus threat. The moment your plug in your it to Mac, it spreads across the entire network of the drive resulting to a data loss.
- Try Quick fixes when WD hard drive is not recognized by Mac. A proper connection is the most basic.
- Mac OS X do not support writing files into NTFS filesystems by default and you cannot copy files to external hard drive from mac. But Mac do support reading the NTFS drives and copying files from NTFS HDDs. Most of the Mac users don’t know this and will buy portable external hard disks to expand the storage space.
- Problems with Mac external hard drive recognition I have a seagate slim Mac BK external hard drive and my PC won't recognize it though I can see it when I go into the device manager.
Mac or MacBook Doesn't recognize External Drives. Troubleshooting tips. Macs like most other computers are well working hardware which includes all the newest technologies, unfortunately sometimes hardware and software miscommunicate and causes issues in proper work.
I have a Toshiba Canvio 1TB USB 3.0 hard drive. But when I plugged it into my Macbook Pro (mid 2012) it didn't show up. I have tried to swap around the USB connection cords but still not showing up. Reading something that the Toshiba hard drive won't show up on Mac laptops due to lack of power, I tried using an external powered USB hub still nothing. Can anyone tell me why my external hard drive is not showing up on the Mac, and how to fix it?
Why is your Toshiba external hard drive not show up on Mac?
In fact, there are various reasons that Mac doesn't recognize an external hard drive. Toshiba external hard drive not showing up could result from file catalog corruption, operating system errors, virus, physical damages, etc. Besides Toshiba portable hard drive, this error can also occur to WD external hard drives, Seagate external hard drives, etc.
Whatever the reason is, it will prevent you from accessing the files stored on it.
How to fix Toshiba external hard drive not showing up on Mac error?
Compared to Toshiba Canvio for Desktop drive, Toshiba portable hard drives offer more possibility. The Canvio range of Toshiba external hard drive includes Slim, Alu, Advance, Premium, Basics, and Ready. Although with unique features, the Toshiba portable hard drive still won't work sometimes.
You can try these solutions when Toshiba disc drive is not showing up on Mac.
Solution 1: Do some basic checks
If your Toshiba external hard drive doesn't show up when connected to a Mac via USB port, follow the troubleshooting ideas below.
1. Toshiba external hard drive is not correctly powered.
Fix: Try to connect it to an externally powered USB hub, or try to insert the Type-C Multi-Port Adapter into another USB port on your Mac.
2. The USB cable is damaged.
Fix: Try a different USB cable but make sure it is compatible with your Toshiba external hard drive.
3. The USB port is damaged.
Fix: Try a different port on your Mac, a different computer, or even a PC to connect this Toshiba hard drive.
3. Toshiba 3.0 external hard drive is not showing up.
Fix: Please update the USB 3.0 driver of your Toshiba hard drive to the latest version on Mac.
Most of the time, you can see the Toshiba external hard drive showing up on Mac again after these checks. If not, let's move forward.
Solution 2: Show the Toshiba external hard drive on the desktop
Usually, a correctly connected external hard drive will show up on the desktop, in Finder and Disk Utility. If you can't see it, just check the settings of your Mac.
Step 1: Click Finder on menu bar.
Step 2: Go to Preferences > General tab.
Step 3: Make sure the 'External disks' option is ticked. If not, tick the box before it.
This operation will show the Toshiba external hard drive on the Mac desktop. Show all windows mac.
Solution 3: Show the Toshiba external hard drive in Finder
Step 1: Go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar tab > Locations.
Step 2: Make sure the 'External disks' option is ticked.
Solution 4: Mount the Toshiba external hard drive in Disk Utility
Sometimes, the connected external hard drive shows up but it won't work on Mac. In this case, you can check if it is recognized and mounted in Disk Utility. If the Toshiba external hard drive is not mounted in Disk Utility, you can mount the drive manually.
Specifically, you can click on the Mount button on the top of the window, or hit the Mount icon beside the drive.
Solution 5: Fix the Toshiba external hard drive in Disk Utility
However, if the Toshiba external hard drive won't mount in Disk Utility, the file system of the drive may be corrupted. You need to fix it with First Aid.
Step 1: Go to Utilities > Disk Utility.
Step 2: Select the unmounted Toshiba external hard drive and click First Aid on the top of the window.
Step 3: Wait till the verification and reparation process ends.
Solution 6: Reformat the Toshiba external hard drive
IfFirst Aid failed on external hard drive, the drive must be severely damaged, logically or physically. In this case, you can firstly try to fix the drive by reformatting, which is able to fix logical errors like file system corruption, partition table corruption, etc.
Note: Reformatting a drive will erase all the files stored on it. To prevent unwanted data loss, it's necessary to recover lost data from the not showing up Toshiba drive in advance.
iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is trustworthy and professional Mac data recovery software that is able torecover deleted photos, videos, documents, music files fromunreadable USB flash drives,unmountable SD cards, memory cards, external hard drives, and corrupted, damaged, formatted, inaccessible drives on macOS Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra/Sierra and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7. It supports HFS+, HFS, FAT32, exFAT andAPFS external drive data recovery.
Tutorial to recover data from the Toshiba external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
Step 1: Download, install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
Step 2: Select the not showing up Toshiba external hard drive and click 'Scan' button. This program will start scanning for lost data.
Step 3: Preview the searching results, choose files you need, and click 'Recover' to get them back.
After recovering data from the Toshiba external hard drive, you can reset the Toshiba external hard drive by reformatting the hard disk in Disk Utility now.
Step 1: Select the Toshiba external hard drive in Disk Utility sidebar.
Step 2: Click Erase on the top of the window.
Step 3: Follow the instructions to finish the reformatting process. Specifically, you need to provide a Name and a Format according to your preference.
After the process finishes, you will hopefully see the Toshiba external hard drive showing up on Mac correctly.
Solution 7: Send the drive to a disk reparation center
If you have tried out all the solutions above with no luck, the Toshiba external hard drive could be damaged physically. In case your Toshiba HDD is not recognized by your PC anymore and the blue LED is OFF and the red LED is ON, the HDD needs to be replaced. You have to send it to specialists or replace it with a new one.
How to make Toshiba external hard drives work on Mac?
Almost all Toshiba Canvio external hard drives are preformatted with NTFS file system, which means you can't use it directly on Mac. You can't write to NTFS in macOS by default. If you try to save files, the new Toshiba external hard drive is not working but read-only on Mac.
To use Toshiba external hard drive on Windows and Mac without formatting, you need to download an NTFS for Mac software. You can also format this external hard drive with HFS+ for Mac usage only. But on Mac, you can't enjoy features provided by Toshiba software like regular automatic backups of data with Toshiba Storage Backup Software and password lock feature with Toshiba Storage Security Software.
Conclusion:
Toshiba external hard drive is widely used in our daily lives to store tons of different files. Once it can't be shown up on your Mac, there're solutions for you to recover lost data with free Mac data recovery software, like iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac, as well as to fix the error through simple steps.
A bonus tip: To keep the security of your data, you should back them up regularly via Time Machine or on another external drive.
• How to backup Mac with Time Machine?
Summary: This post introduces 5 solutions you can try when you are unable to mount an external hard drive on your Mac. Also, to avoid further data loss, you can use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover lost data from this unmountable external drive first.
- Table of contents
- 1. Why you can't mount your external hard drive on Mac?
- 2. How to fix when external disks won't mount on Mac?
- 3. Conclusion
After you connect an external hard drive to your Mac, if everything is working fine, the operating system will automatically recognize, read, and mount your external drive, as well as show it in the Finder and on the desktop. Sims freeplay mac. However, if your disk gives up the ghost just like the users below, the external disk will not be showing up as normal. And if you check it in the Disk Utility, you will find your drive unmounted there.
'I was able to use my 3 TB external hard disk drive to backup my data last week. But now it doesn't mount after I migrate from Mojave to macOS Catalina. I dug around and tried a lot of stuff but still can't mount this external hard drive on my Mac. Can someone explain how to get this drive mounted so I don't lose the data?'
Why an external drive is not mounting on Mac?
There are numerous reasons for the external hard drive not mounting issue. The following are a few of the most common ones:
Hardware and connectivity issue
Most of the time, you can't mount your external drive on a Mac just because the connectivity is not in proper condition. This issue may be affected by a loose fitting, a broken USB cable, the wear on USB ports, etc. Sometimes, such connectivity issues could make your external drives keep disconnecting, or much worse, it would make your external hard drive unmountable eventually. After all, it is essential to have a firm and tight connection.
Corrupted disk
Another possible reason for an unmounted disk may come from the problematic hard drive itself. Wonder how could it be? Well, it is possible that you're unable to mount a drive just because it is corrupted and unrecognizable by macOS. You can recall if your external drive has experienced one of these things: an unsafe removal when you are transferring files, an improper ejection, a sudden power outage, or even a virus infection. If so, your disk might be corrupted and it should be the culprit that you are unable to mount your external drive probably.
Incorrect formatting of the disk
Western digital 1tb my passport portable hard drive mac. In some cases, an unsupported file system will make your external drive unmountable. It is reasonable because if your Mac can't even read your disk's file system, how can you mount and access this hard drive on your Mac? This factor may not be as possible as the other causes, but it does happen.
Unable to mount external hard drives on Mac, how to fix?
Even though the reasons for a not mounting disk are different from case to case, certainly there are some things you can do to fix this issue. The following are five effective solutions to the 'external hard drives won't mount on Mac' issue, and some of them are just basic checks.
Solution 1: Check and fix connectivity issues
The first thing you can do is to make sure that your disk is connected to your Mac properly. Here are some things you can try.
- Reconnect your external hard drive to your Mac and ensure that it fits the USB port snugly.
- Connect the external hard drive to a different USB port or a different Mac. If you are not sure if there is a problem with the USB port/hub, you can plug a working external drive in to a port/on a hub, unmount and eject it. Then plug the unmountable external hard drive into that port/hub.
- Replace the USB cable or adapter in case that it was damaged or broken.
- Connect it to a Windows PC and see if the storage device is powered on and working.
Solution 2: Check the file system of the external hard drive
Well, if you don't know exactly what file system your disk is formatted with while your external hard drive can't be mounted now, you can go to Disk Utility to have a check if it is formatted with an unsupported file system. Remember that macOS is friendly with APFS and HFS+ and is in a neutral attitude with FAT, FAT32, and exFAT. However, it is a different story if you need to access and write to NTFS file system on Mac. By default, macOS only enables NTFS drive read support but disables write support. In this case, you can download a free NTFS driver for macOS to mount this external hard drive in read and write mode.
Mac Doesn't Recognize External Drive
Still unable to mount the external hard drive on Mac? Then it should be some problems with the drive itself. You can try the following solutions to troubleshoot this problem.
Wait! Have you recovered your important data from this unmountable drive?
Before you go any further to fix this unmountable hard drive, you'd better make sure you have backed up your data on this drive to avoid data loss. The reason is that when your external drive won't mount, you lose the only access to all your files on this drive. In this situation, if you have important files on the external hard drive, any operations on the drive could overwrite the original data and cause irreparable data loss.
Forget to back up before? You can also use Mac data recovery software like iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover lost data from the unmountable external hard drives.
iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is afree external hard drive data recovery tool that enables you to recover lost data from external drives, especially when a hard drive is unmounted, formatted, inaccessible, unreadable, or corrupted. It's fully compatible with macOS Catalina 10.15/Mojave 10.14/High Sierra 10.13/10.12 and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7. In addition to external hard drive data recovery, it also can recover lost data from internal Mac hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, memory cards, pen drives, etc.
Tutorial to recover lost data from unmountable external drive on Mac with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac
Step 1: Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on Mac.
To use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac, you need to install this software on your Mac. You can just download the installation package and install it with no fuss.
Step 2: Launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
After successfully downloading this program on your Mac, you can drag it to your Applications folder to install it, or you can double-click its icon to launch it.
Step 3: Select the unmountable external drive and click Scan button to scan all lost data.
When the Mac data recovery software is launched, all connected storage devices will be listed in the interface. You can see the name, file system, and space allocation of your hard drives and partitions. Locate your unmounted external hard drive, select it, and click 'Scan' to scan for lost data. Two scanning modes are allowed: Quick scan and Deep scan. Quick scan mode saves time for users and is applied when data is recently deleted. Deep scan mode finds more files at the cost of more time, and it's used when file system is corrupted or partition table is lost. Anyway, this software will automatically choose the most efficient way to scan for files according to the disk condition.
Mac Won't Recognize Hard Drive
Step 4: Preview the searching results, choose files you need, and click Recover to get them back.
Mac Won't Mount External Drive
With the preview feature, you can check whether your files on this unmountable disk are in a good condition or not. It saves time and money for users. The software will show if your file is corrupted so that you would not waste energy to recover it or pay for this data recovery product.
Step 5: Have a check to ensure you have got all lost data back.
Now you either have a copy of a data backup in hand, or have recovered your important files with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac. Therefore, you can go ahead to repair this unmounted external drive without worrying about data loss.
Solution 3: Repair the external hard drive with Disk Utility
Pc Won't Recognize External Hard Drive
When an external hard drive is not working properly, you can use the built-in disk repair tool - First Aid to check and repair disk errors.
Step 1: Launch Disk Utility.
Step 2: Choose the unmountable external drive on the left sidebar.
Step 3: Select First Aid in the top center and click Run.
Solution 2: Repair the external hard drive with Terminal
Sometimes, Disk Utility may not function as desired. Fortunately, you can still try to repair the corrupted external hard drive with Terminal.
Step 1: Go to Applications > Terminal
Step 2: Enter: diskutil list (This will list out the available volumes).
Step 3: Check the volume identifier from the table that appears.
Step 4: Enter:diskutil repairVolume [diskvolume identifier]. For example, if the volume identifier of an external hard drive is disk2s, you should enterdiskutil repairVolume disk2s.
Solution 3: Reformat the external hard drive
If yourexternal hard drive can't be repaired with Disk Utility and Terminal, the file system of this drive might be seriously corrupted. The only way to fix this unmountable external drive is to reformat it.
Warning: Reformatting will erase all data on the external hard drive, so please make sure you have backed up important data.
1. Launch Disk Utility from Utilities.
External Hard Drive Won't Mount
Hard Drive Won't Mount Mac
2. Click the icon of the unmountable external drive on the left part of the window.
3. Click the Erase function on the top of the Disk Utility window.
4. Complete the related information (name, format, scheme), then click Erase button.
Conclusion
When you can't mount an external hard drive on your Mac, you can try the 5 methods introduced in this post. But no matter which solution you are going to try, to avoid data loss, you are always advised to back up your files or recover your data from this unmountable drive first with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
Mac Won't Recognize External Drive
But if unfortunately, none of these solutions can make your hard drive work again, or your disk is not even detected or showing up in Disk Utility, then this drive might be physically damaged. Under this situation, you should send it to a local disk repair service and see if they can help.
Good luck!