Earlier today I noticed that neither of my two external hard drives are being recognized by my Macintosh nor do they appear in Finder. However, one of them, which I use for certain backups, does load and work on my newer PC no problem if I connect it to there.
Oddly, despite my Time Machine hard drive not appearing anywhere in Finder, I can still use Time Machine on my Mac to view backups made on my Mac.
Hmmm...
n Finder's Menu, select Go menu>Go to Folder, and go to "/volumes". (no quotes)
Volumes is where an alias to your hard drive ("/" at boot) is placed at startup, and where all the "mount points" for auxiliary drives are created for you to access them. This folder is normally hidden from view.
Drives with an extra 1 on the end have a side-effect of mounting a drive with the same name as the system already think exists. Try trashing the duplicates with a 1 or 2 if there are no real files in them, and reboot.
If it does contain data...
Duplicate mount point in /Volumes after unexpected restart - Apple Support
Hmmm...
n Finder's Menu, select Go menu>Go to Folder, and go to "/volumes". (no quotes)
Volumes is where an alias to your hard drive ("/" at boot) is placed at startup, and where all the "mount points" for auxiliary drives are created for you to access them. This folder is normally hidden from view.
Drives with an extra 1 on the end have a side-effect of mounting a drive with the same name as the system already think exists. Try trashing the duplicates with a 1 or 2 if there are no real files in them, and reboot.
If it does contain data...
Duplicate mount point in /Volumes after unexpected restart - Apple Support
We need to see what all is running, a report from this will not display any personal info...
EtreCheck is a FREE simple little diagnostic tool to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac. It will not display any personal info.
Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report if you capture the URL while there…
Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck. In a Reply before you click post, look for this to add longer texts...
Maybe the best maybe not, but common enough to try.
Also Open Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities, select All Processes & sort on Name, see if fsck is running. Force quit if it is.
Do you have all of these checkboxes checked in the Finder's General settings?
un-check and re-check the boxes
use Safe Mode followed by a normal restart
Try the following: Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac - Apple Support (for Intel Macs) and Mac startup key combinations - Apple Support (for both types) and How to reset the SMC of your Mac - Apple Support
+1 OT
I was also thinking of that, because the Time Machine drive is working.
Change Finder settings on Mac - Apple Support
So resetting the NVRAM or PRAM is the best process to get external hard drives and flash drives that otherwise work but don't show in Finder to appear?
I also noticed that ever since I started running into this problem, my Mac takes longer to boot than normal, freezing on the halfway point for about a minute until it progresses like normal, and before that, partway through the bootup there would be one split second where random colored pixels appear on the screen.
Come to think of it, I have been getting "you've shut your computer down because of a problem" errors on my Mac for the past couple of days each time I shut down normally and then turn it on the next day, and I don't know why. I wonder if it's linked to these issues I've been running into.
fsck is not on the list.
It's a possible solution. No guarantee but it certainly can't hurt to try it.
I just checked, there are no drives shown in the Volumes folder except for the Macintosh HD.
Yup, it's all checked.
I went through and did the uncheck-recheck just in case, it still only shows the Macintosh HD (and any iOS device I have plugged in)
iMac does not detect or show external hard drives
