Why is my external hard drive greyed out in finder and on desktop?

Hi Ant, Is it greyed out in disk utility? If you dont know how to access this, go into applications, utilities then disk utility, and see if its greyed out down the left of there. And also have you tried unmounting the drive and then remounting it? im sure you will have but thought i would mention it 🙂 If its there in disk utility try repairing the disk and verifying the disk permissions if u can, see if this does the trick 🙂

Try resetting both the SMC and PRAM at least 2x each, sometimes the resets don't "take" the first time. If you don't have experience doing these resets you can find instructions at:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3603

Did you find a solution? I have the exact same problem.

this is happening to me now also. Any updates on fixes?

Me also, second disk on Mac Mini and Drobo disk

Mac Mini Mavericks Server 2nd Partition greyed out

Had this exact same issue with a Drobo device greying out just one partition. One of our techs came across:

$ cd /Volumes

$ chflags nohidden (volume name)

and this fixed our issue. Hope it works for others.

Thanks IPFW Sysadmin

You are a STAR!

this works 🙂

I've got a very similar situation. It's a Toshiba external drive, formatted to Mac OSX Extended Journaled. I'm sharing it to other computers who can access the drive without many issues (only problem there is that sometimes files you're working on, cant be saved, and you have to resave them to the original location). However on my server machine (mac mini) the external doesn't show up in the finder, or on the desktop. It shows up normal and mounted in Disk Utility. When I run a verify or repair, everything checks out fine. It's a very new hard drive. If I'm in Disk Utility and I right click on the drive, I'm able to choose Open "Server Files" and see the contents of the drive. However when I do this, I can see then name of the file grayed out. I do have an eject icon as you can see below.

Unmounting, remounting, rebooting, nothing makes this drive appear. I'm going to try the SMP and Pram resets and if that works I'll post back.

Real problem here is that since the drive doesn't show up in the finder, It's not being backed up via Time Machine, and I really need it to be.

Thanks for any extra advice.

Has anyone found a solution to this problem I have the same thing occurring. Brand New external Hard Drive seems to work for a while then all of sudden goes gray on my desktop and shows gray in the finder. Once that happens I do a restart and the icon will not show on the desktop at all. The only way I have been able to fix this is by using disk warrior and repairing the directory on the drive and then all is good. All of this seemed to occur after I updated to Mavericks.

This indeed solved my problem too. But the problem randomly returns, then it works fine for a couple of weeks and then its graying out again.... Anyone having this as well?

Hi leendertstruik

Yes, still having this issue. Works to get the disk back but several weeks later it returns and have to rerun the commands 😟

Oke, i discovered Apple didn't fix this in 10.8 or 10.9 but in 10.10 it looks like to be fixed... Really unbelievable.

leendertstruik

Fundamental issue!

Thinking about it, since I upgraded to 10.10 about 12 days ago, it has not happened. But, it has only been 12 days!

Fingers crossed.

Interesting I'm running 10.9.4 now. I'll do the upgrade and wait to see what happens. I had it gray out yesterday and had to use Disk Warrior to recover it. It usually takes about a week or two and then it happens again. I'll keep everyone posted.