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2009 iMac not recognizing external hard drive

2009 iMac not recognizing external hard drive. My 2009 Mac Pro died power supply. It was cheaper for me to buy an older iMac. I removed the hard drive from my Mac pro and put it into an enclosure to use as an external drive. However it’s not showing up on the desktop or in disk utilities. I don’t want to wipe the drive because of the information on it I wish to transfer that to the iMac any suggestions?

Posted on Sep 17, 2021 10:55 AM

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Posted on Sep 17, 2021 4:33 PM

You should be able to see the drive with that setup, if both the drive and enclosure are working.


I would recheck the drive connection inside of the enclosure and then the external connections.


Then if that doesn't work, I would try another drive enclosure, a drive dock or a SATA to USB drive adapter.

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Sep 17, 2021 4:33 PM in response to dragonfey

You should be able to see the drive with that setup, if both the drive and enclosure are working.


I would recheck the drive connection inside of the enclosure and then the external connections.


Then if that doesn't work, I would try another drive enclosure, a drive dock or a SATA to USB drive adapter.

Sep 17, 2021 1:40 PM in response to den.thed

Then Enclosure is from KUWFI.

The power supply was diagnosed by a Mac repair shop. I don’t have a backup drive because I could never get a second drive to initialize on that computer. That said I think the problem may be that iMac has an earlier version of software than my hard drive so I am updating its software now. I hope that works

Sep 17, 2021 10:35 PM in response to den.thed

Even the instructions were laughable. But I took it out of the enclosure as you suggested and just plugged it into the front and to hook it up. And it’s working after a fashion. This hard drive is dying and that’s one reason why I wanted to get it working. I’m currently using migration manager to transfer files etc. to the iMac. It’s been a long day with this machine and I really thank you

2009 iMac not recognizing external hard drive

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