External HDD's no longer appear or mount under Mountain Lion (10.8)

Question

External HDD's no longer appear or mount under Mountain Lion (10.8)

Updated to Mountian Lion, however, the first and biggest problem is my external HDD's no longer even appear. The computer does not automount them.

I have a minor theory, I used to use Paragon NTFS and the two drives that are not appearing are the NTFS based HDD's. One is a WD 1TB and the other is a Seagate 2TB. I have two 2TB Seagates, one is brand new and empty, so far, both do not come up when I plug it in. Both are self powered (as in I have to plug them into an external powersource) I have yet to test my HDD dock with all my WD SATA HDD's yet.

I haven't had a chance to check it via the disk utility as of yet (had to get rush to work). I uninstalled Paragon NTFS thinking it simply didn't work well with the new Mac OS ML, but I'm still unsure at this point. I installed in it's place the TUXERA software since they claimed it work was working under ML. I also installed the last OS update Apple pu through, but that solved no inherant problems I had been experiencing.

Even then, I know that although Mac cannot write to NTFS drives in it's orginal state, it should at least pick them up and mount them. So far, I haven't even seen that happen.

So far, my external drives have still not appeared, I've already checked that the "show external drives" option for desktop is selected as well. I haven't really spent a lot of time with my computer since installing ML... Probably 2 hours at best (the better par spend on my original Wifi issues... Which seemed to be resolved now, and my magic mouse contantly losing signal

I don't know if this is simply a Finder issue, or general OS problems.

Hope someone has a solution! Thanks in advance.

iMac (27-inch Mid 2010), OS X Mountain Lion, (Also runs Windows 7 via Bootcamp)

Posted on Jul 26, 2012 6:45 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 3, 2013 9:41 AM in response to deeviousgenius

This may be unrelated (as I'm on Lion, with similar issues with two WD external HD). But what I found fixed the problem was to

1. go to the manufacturer's website (in this case Western Digital),

2. locate my external HD, download the download.

For instance, I downloaded the WD Drive Utilities for Mac (for My Passport for Mac USB 3.0):

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=219&sid=157&lang=en

Install the downloaded app.

3. Plug in external (this part, I think is important) directly into your tower or laptop (as opposed to through a USB multi-plug extender). Possibly this is because you access more power?

[I'm trying to remember in which order everything happened. But I think at this point the external hard drive mounted]

4. Install the software that is found on the external HD (in my case, it was a brand new device, so that had never been installed).

5. Run "WD Drive Utilities" and run diagnostics.

6. Test to see if it holds. Unmount the External HD. Unplug. Replug in and see if it mounts.

Note: I have not yet tested to see if plugging in the external somewhere other than directly into the tower also works. But I think the main problem is getting it to mount the first time and installing the software. That's what I think.

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