I plug in a Toshiba 500 Gb External Hard drive and it doesn't show up on the desktop, in the finder window or in Disk Utility. It shows up in all those places on my work iMac and my son's laptop. Any ideas why my computer doesn't recognize it? Thanks for any help.
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 w/4GB memory
Not in DU? I'll assume you also have the Finder preferences, general to show volumes on the desk top. Can you hear it even spin up?
Is this external connected with USB? If so are there any other devices connected to your usb's? Try disconnecting them. Perhaps you need a powered usb hub?
Might try doing a smc reset.
Thanks for responding. The external drive shows up on my other imac but not in the finder window or on the desktop or in DU on the iMac in question. It connects with a USB 3.0 cable but states that it is compatible with 2.0 as well. Flash drives show up when plugged into the USB ports of which there are four. The power indicator light on the drive is on and I can feel the drive spinning.Tried doing a smc reset and it didn't help.
I suspect we will need to know the full and exact specifications of all hardware involved. It could be a matter of this being one of those things where it says it will work with an older machine but it doesn't.
Thanks, but the machine is an August 2011 (last summer) new purchase, so it's not an older machine at all. Thanks, again.
donna226 wrote:
It connects with a USB 3.0 cable but states that it is compatible with 2.0 as well.
USB3 is downward compatible with USB2.
Flash drives show up when plugged into the USB ports of which there are four. The power indicator light on the drive is on and I can feel the drive spinning.Tried doing a smc reset and it didn't help.
As an experiment disconnect all those other usb connections.
I'm having this same problem - 500gb Toshiba portable drive (USB 2.0 version) - mounts and works fine on our MacBook Pro, won't mount on the iMac.
Any updates?
Did you ever find a solution for this problem. I have the same problem with several Hitachi 1TB drives which were previously used on a drobo. I couldn't erase 2 of them and couldn't see the third. I was able to see them, erase and partition them on a mbp but still can't even see them on the imac either in the finder or DU.
iMac can't see my external hard drive
