OS 10.14.6 I accidently disconnected an external hard drive without moving it to the trash. How do I get it to activate/show up on my desktop
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benvideo wrote:
OS 10.14.6 I accidently disconnected an external hard drive without moving it to the trash. How do I get it to activate/show up on my desktop
There are no more details
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
If the improper disconnect damaged the external drive's file system, often the MacOS will try to run fsck (file system diagnosis and check) to diagnose and repair the drive if possible. This can take a long time, maybe even an hour or more, depending on the size and speed of the drive (mechanical drives are slower). The drive does not appear or mount until fsck finishes. When it finishes, it may mount normally, or if badly damaged, may still not be usable.
Connect the problem drive and reboot. When the Mac boots up, if the drive has not appeared, look in Activity monitor for a process that has "fsck" in it. It might have the letters "hfs" or "apfs" also attached to that process name. If you see such a process, let it run until completion. When that happens, I am guessing there is about a 25% chance that your disk will mount again. If it does, copy what you can from it and erase/reformat it if you want to keep using it.
Some have reported that when they manually kill that process (you can do that from Activity Monitor), the disk immediately mounts. I would consider it an unreliable drive at that point and again would copy everything possible from it and erase/reformat for future use. Personally, I would no longer trust such a drive because the disconnect obviously damaged it and if the damage is hardware, then it will never work properly. If it is just the file system that was damaged, that can be addressed by a reformat. Reformatting will lose all content so copy what you can first before doing that.
benvideo wrote:
OS 10.14.6 I accidently disconnected an external hard drive without moving it to the trash. How do I get it to activate/show up on my desktop
There are no more details
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
If the improper disconnect damaged the external drive's file system, often the MacOS will try to run fsck (file system diagnosis and check) to diagnose and repair the drive if possible. This can take a long time, maybe even an hour or more, depending on the size and speed of the drive (mechanical drives are slower). The drive does not appear or mount until fsck finishes. When it finishes, it may mount normally, or if badly damaged, may still not be usable.
Connect the problem drive and reboot. When the Mac boots up, if the drive has not appeared, look in Activity monitor for a process that has "fsck" in it. It might have the letters "hfs" or "apfs" also attached to that process name. If you see such a process, let it run until completion. When that happens, I am guessing there is about a 25% chance that your disk will mount again. If it does, copy what you can from it and erase/reformat it if you want to keep using it.
Some have reported that when they manually kill that process (you can do that from Activity Monitor), the disk immediately mounts. I would consider it an unreliable drive at that point and again would copy everything possible from it and erase/reformat for future use. Personally, I would no longer trust such a drive because the disconnect obviously damaged it and if the damage is hardware, then it will never work properly. If it is just the file system that was damaged, that can be addressed by a reformat. Reformatting will lose all content so copy what you can first before doing that.
Disconnect it from the computer and reconnect it.
Reboot if necessary.
What type of external drive is this... hdd, ssd... flash drive?
How old is it?
What Mac model and year are you using?
What version macOS are you running?
Do you have any anti-virus or clean-up or vpn applications installed?
If a simple reboot of your Mac doesn’t fix things, see if the problem still happens in Safe mode. It can take much longer to safe boot (5 min) so be patient.
How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support
Safe mode will often correct weird software behavior by forcing the OS to do cache clearing and other housekeeping. When you're in safe boot, the machine won’t be at its best performance, especially with graphics, but that's expected.
Does the problem persist while in Safe mode?
Exit safe mode by restarting your Mac normally and evaluate the issue again.
Thanks but I've done that several times to no avail? Any other ideas?
I finally got it after many attempts and there were so many I don't even recall how I did it. But thanks for all the suggestions.
Improperly ejected external disk not showing on iMac desktop
