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Level 1

25 points

External Hard Drive Not Showing Up

Ok so Im not sure what is going on here. I come in to use my computer yesterday and notice the external HD is not on my desktop. It is running, but not displaying on the desktop. My first step is to restart the computer. I restart the computer and still nothing. Today, I opened up disk utility. The hard drive shows up in the disk utility. I have run both Verify and Repair disk to the external HD and after the scans it says the HD appears to be OK. I restart the computer and nothing happens. I can also eject the HD from the disk utility. After it is ejected I can unplug it and plug it back in and it will display in the Disk Utility, but nowhere else. It does not show up on the desktop and does not show up in the side bar. I have also gone into to preferences to verify that the box is checked to show the external HD.

I am trying to give as much detail as I can to help diagnose the problem and I have searched through the forums but can't seem to find anything or anyone that has had a similar problem. I need pointed in the right direction to try and figure out why the HD is not showing up on the Desktop. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Jan 3, 2011 8:25 PM

85 replies

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Jan 18, 2011 4:39 PM in response to mustngpny50

Select the item "500.11 GB Iomega" and look at the SMART status info at the bottom of the window. What does that say?

IMHO, this sounds like the drive has died, but it's hard to be sure at this point. Certainly, though, I've only ever had two drives fail to mount in all my years of using Macs, and in both cases the drives were dead. Of course, in both those cases, they didn't show up +at all+ in Disk Utility, so your drive might only be mostly dead... and a pill from Miracle Max won't help there. 😉

Jan 21, 2011 9:09 PM in response to mustngpny50

im having the exact same problem as mustngpny50. I have tried plugging in my external drive to three different macs. They all show the drive in disk utility with the indented drive grayed out.

I look forward to finding an answer. I was just using my external drive the other day and it was fine. And I don't think it is dead because I just purchased it in August 2010.

I would normally reformat my drive, but I have a lot of important data i need on it. So reformatting is not an option until i can copy those files elsewhere.

panbin

Level 1

0 points

Jun 5, 2011 6:48 PM in response to mustngpny50

Hey,

Have you finally solved the problem? Same problem happened to me a month ago, tried everything but in vain. though I noticed that beside what you described, I found the following problem.

Owners Enabled : No

Can Turn Owners Off : Yes

Trying to use 'sudo' command to enable it. but the disk does not respond to the 'ls' command.

If you happened to solve the problem, please kindly let me know.

Thanks so much

Aug 19, 2011 7:04 AM in response to macintoshforlife

I came to this page looking for a solution to a similar problem. I installed a bare Seagate Constellation HD into an external USB 2 enclosure onto a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard. A warning popped up which said the drive was not readable, Initialize, Ignore, or Retry? (I think). I clicked on Initialize. It did nothing. The drive did not show up at Disk Utility.

On the same machine, I started Parallels running XP and clicked over the USB to ATA bridge device to the VM. Windows Disk Manager recognized the drive right away - no problems at all. There were no partitions. I added an NTFS partition and formatted half the drive. When I released the drive from Parallels then it came right up in SL's Disk Utility. I created the second partition as FAT and it was available for r/w while NTFS was r/o.

I'm thinking SL has some issues with external USB drives when they have no partitions defined. If you can't see the drive, try partitioning it on a WindowsXP system first.

Dec 20, 2011 8:37 AM in response to mustngpny50

1. Change visibility of the drive(s) from "hidden" to "show" using a tool such as Onyx. Then restart your Mac. Go to step 2 if step 1 is not helpful.

2. Close all items in Finder. Delete /Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist Restart your Mac.

Feb 14, 2012 9:51 PM in response to mustngpny50

Not sure if people are still needing such a simple solution or if it will work for everyone but one of the 4 externals in my chain unmounted today and I couldn't figure out how to remount. Read many fourums and tried DiskUtility, restarted, allsorts of crap.

...then I turned the Power button off and back on and it mounted automatically again 🙂

Maybe just make sure stuff you're working on or still open in other apps is saved and backed up before you do it.

Bam!!!

DrTeak

Level 1

5 points

Feb 15, 2012 6:36 PM in response to mustngpny50

i was going through the same problems. went through the above steps and got my Hard Drive to amazingly showed up, then miraculously vanished again yet showed up in disk utilities...

i think what is going on is that my hard drive has a sort of sleep function cause when my computer went to sleep then woke back up my hard drive mounted and is running fine... so maybe we just need the computer to go to sleep with the hd plugged in?

will keep u updated if i go back to invisible state.

lestein

Level 1

9 points

Mar 24, 2012 7:46 AM in response to mustngpny50

My external HD iomega wasn't showing up either.

In the end, it showed up when I connected the 2 usb for the HD to the iMac USB ports, insted of going through my Kensington USB hub ..

Mar 27, 2012 10:02 PM in response to mustngpny50

I have the same problem too! the day before yesterday it would read it on my MAC, then i added some files onto the HD on my PC at work, now it doesnt show up.. I have a program installed on my MAC so it can read a Windows formatted HD. There is nothing wrong with the hard drive as when i plug it into my WD Live Media player it works & reads files perfectly. It just wont show up on the desktop to open HD and access files.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks

Mar 28, 2012 1:58 AM in response to mustngpny50

So i have fixed mine, try this too.. it didnt do anything to my data but always back up

go to Disc Utlity and click on the hard drive on the left, on the right there is an option to Verify Disc, run this and then mine said it had a minor error, so i ran the Repair Disc and once it ran it fixed it and all good now.

hope this works for you

Mar 29, 2012 3:00 AM in response to mustngpny50

I had the same problem. Plug in an external hard drive, any hard drive, even a USB stick, it shows in finder's side bar, but not on desktop. Solved.

Sounds like a huge problem? I'm just wondering if the answer you are looking for is on this link

http://macs.about.com/od/faq1/f/Drive-Icons-Missing-From-Your-Macs-Desktop.htm

Its just setting in FInder's Preference. "Show these items on desktop". Voila!

Not sure if this is the problems you guys are facing. Hope this helps.

Simon V.

Level 1

5 points

Apr 18, 2012 7:24 AM in response to mustngpny50

Hello

I have a problem with my external harddisk, when I plug it in my mac book pro version 10.6.8 I can't find it. When I look in my disk utilities he finds him but can't activate it anymore. I tried typing ls -laeO@ /Volumes in the terminal and then this comes out:

ls -laeO@ /VolumesLast login: Wed Apr 18 16:10:09 on ttys000

MacBook-Pro-van-Simon-Pierre-Verstraete:~ SimonVerstraete$ ls -laeO@ /Volumes

total 8

drwxrwxrwt@ 3 root admin hidden 102 18 apr 16:00 .

com.apple.FinderInfo 32

0: group:everyone deny add_file,add_subdirectory,directory_inherit,only_inherit

drwxrwxr-x 33 SimonVerstraete staff - 1190 7 apr 08:54 ..

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin - 1 13 apr 12:16 Macintosh HD -> /

MacBook-Pro-van-Simon-Pierre-Verstraete:~ SimonVerstraete$

Can somebody help me?

Jun 23, 2012 6:43 PM in response to Simon V.

The above thread put me on the right path, and I hope my experience helps others.

Problem: iMac suddently stopped showing two 2TB iomega hard drives that store our videos, photos, etc. (reformatting was not an option...) I tried different USB ports, firewire, restarting, connecting to my MacBook, etc. and message always said drives cannot be read by either iMac or MacBook. It seemed too coindicental for 2 drives to have failed at once...

Solution:

1) Based on above thread, I went to System Profile in my MacBook with one drive connected via USB. The drive was seen there.

2) Next, I went to Disk Utility, where the drive was seen. Icon showd up as "2TB External..." and underneath and indented there was a gray name that was NOT the name I had given the drive.

3) I hit "Verified Disk" -- and it said "Invalid Index Key. ...(drive name I HAD given drive)...found corrupt and needs to be repaired. Error... Click Repair Disk."
4) I clicked "Repair Disk" a first time. It failed with message "Disk Utility Stopped Repairing..." -- not sure why.

5) I tried "Repari Disk" again, and this time it took longer, gave many more lines in the window as it did it's job, had messages in green instead of red, and the file was repaired!

6) Disconnected drive, turned off MacBook and drive, rebooted MacBook, connected drive via USB, turned on drive -- and there it was on the desktop with its correct assigned name!

I hope this helps.

Mar 1, 2013 4:23 PM in response to mustngpny50

For me the problem was much more simple than any of this... the 4-port USB hub I was using suddenly went bad. If you're plugging your external HD into a USB hub you may want to ensure that other things can connect to the hub okay before thinking something happened to your HD.

Mar 16, 2013 5:37 PM in response to jsd2

hey dude...... i need your help...... if i copy my terminate log to you can you tell me what i need to do to have my Mercury harddrive up.

i updated because my Java was messing up and after restart my mercury never showed bak up

External Hard Drive Not Showing Up