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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

drappoc

Level 1

12 points

May 14, 2016 12:40 PM in response to MacApple258

The Onyx utility worked a treat

now I have the icon back

Thank you

TM650

Level 1

8 points

May 23, 2016 10:03 AM in response to Sam Haron

Thanks. This solved my problem. Ext drive was connected and working, but it would not show up in Finder sidebar. The main hard disk and other ext drives were displayed, but this one disappeared after I did a drag and drop of the drive into a program (from the App Store) to find duplicate files. I don't know how it ever got into the App Store. Anyway, even though the drive no longer showed in the Side Bar under Devices, I could go to the <my name> iMac item under devices in Side Bar and I could see all of the ext hard drives including the missing drive. The rogue find duplicates app appears to have removed the entry in Side Bar. As Sam mentions, I open Find Preferences and clicked on Side Bar. I noticed that External Disks (under Devices) was not selected or deselected. Instead, it had a "-" in the box. I clicked the box until it was selected again (check mark appears) and the missing ext drive reappeared in the Side Bar.

Judeaj

Level 1

8 points

Jun 24, 2016 7:57 PM in response to anarKaliG

OMG THIS WORKED! THANK YOU!

I had accidentally dragged my external drive off my side finder panel earlier today and I'm wondering if that had something to do with it. Thanks again for this super easy solution!

Sep 13, 2016 6:28 PM in response to irisjchan

I had the same problem for over a year and finally fixed it yesterday. My WD 2T Elements wasn't showing up, on my Mac, and Disk Utility would spin forever without finding it. I fiddled around with Terminal after reading this article http://www.theinstructional.com/guides/disk-management-from-the-command-line-par t-1,

and basically by simply typing: diskutil list , i was able to see it in terminal. Then i tried everything, from erasing the disk although it had valuable albeit unusable data but couldn't unmount. Long story short, while failed, but forgotten plugged in the usb, after 30 minutes or so i 've noticed it on my Desktop. So i have transferred all the valuable files to another drive, and reformatted it as Mac Journalled. The compatibility of eXfat i had previously formatted it seemed to mess things up. Since then i have tested it several times, and have been using it. Hope that helps. If it does, please come back and rate this so others will benefit. Good luck!

Oct 11, 2016 10:41 AM in response to mustngpny50

I read all the replies...

I ended up I going to the external hard drive's website (in my case, Seagate) and downloaded the link to reinstall the drive so it can be read on my mac. TADA! So thankful it wasn't anything more than that. Hope this helps.