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Trying to Force Mount in Terminal

My external HDD is reading but not showing up. I tried to force mount the drive but an error code pops up and says this [Could no mount"disk2s2'. (com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930868.)

I attempted to force mount following the procedures on Terminal starting from finding the drive in diskutil list. From there I tried to force mount, but not working. I then did the ls -la /Volumes/ then sudo mkdir /Volumes/External then sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk2/Volumes/external and still could not mount it.

My external HDD has been with me since 2014 and I only started using it on the go. Really need the files on it to not be erased.

macOS Catalina

Version 10.15.2

Macbook Pro Mid-2012 15-inch

2.3 GHz Quad Core Intel Core i7

256GB SSD

16GB Ram

MacBook

Posted on Jan 29, 2020 3:13 AM

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

60,380 points

Posted on Jan 29, 2020 7:35 PM

RichardCepeda wrote:

then sudo mkdir /Volumes/External then sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk2/Volumes/external and still could not mount it.

First your command is incorrect as you are trying to mount the whole drive "disk2" when you need to be mounting a partition which would be "disk2s1" or "disk2s2". Also you should keep the same case for the "[E|e]xternal".

Have you tried running Disk Utility First Aid on it?

My external HDD has been with me since 2014 and I only started using it on the go.

You should try checking the health of the external drive. Perhaps it is beginning to fail and carrying it around may have hastened it a bit. You can try checking the health of the drive by using DriveDX. You will need to install a special USB driver so that DriveDX can communicate properly with the external drive. Even with this special USB driver DriveDX may not be able to communicate properly with the external drive since some of the external drives' USB controllers do not let the necessary communication to pass through to the actual hard drive. Post the DriveDX report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

Really need the files on it to not be erased.

You should always have good verified working backups of all your data. This includes external drives as well. You may need to contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers or Ontrack. Both vendors are recommended by Apple and other OEMs and both provide free estimates.

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Trying to Force Mount in Terminal

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