External Hard Drive won't show up

Question

External Hard Drive won't show up

Hello everyone

I have an Iomega hard drive that I have partitioned for Time Machine and for Storage.

It's worked fine for two years, and for some reason it won't show up in Finder or on my desktop.

Can you help me? All the plugs work correctly. It doesn't show up in Disk Utility. If I type diskutil list into Terminal I can see it, but I don't know what to do from there.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Feb 17, 2011 4:58 PM

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Answer 1

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Feb 17, 2011 5:03 PM in response to CerpinTaxt848

If it's not showing up in Disk Utility, even after rebooting, disconnecting and reconnecting the drive, etc, chances are good that it has died, or is at least mostly dead. You could try another utility, like [DiskWarrior|http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html] or [TechTool Pro|http://www.micromat.com>, but there are no guarantees.

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Answer 2

macjack

Level 10

111,168 points

Feb 17, 2011 6:17 PM in response to CerpinTaxt848

CerpinTaxt848 wrote:
If I type diskutil list into Terminal I can see it, but I don't know what to do from there.

Use this command

mount /dev/(number of disk, without parenthesis)

Press Return.

As Thomas states this sounds like a fried disk but you can run some other tests to be sure.

Here 2 other utilities you can use to verify...
Applejack Freeware
DriveGenius, Demo In Demo mode you can run hardware tests but cannot repair. That's really all you need to let you know if the disk any good or not.

Let us know,

-mj

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Answer 3

Feb 19, 2011 7:38 AM in response to CerpinTaxt848

This sounds definitely like a dead disk. Have you tried it on another machine.

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