Seagate External HDD won't show up.

I made a stupid profile just to answer your question, I like that my first apple forum response is to 'disneyland' so thanks disneyland for continuing to give us hope and answers to our live's questions... seagate is renowned for only working on windows. I see this questions constantly and never see a helpful answer so here it is... tell your friends. (answer includes: how to format normally, formatting advice, then how to format if your hd isn't showing up at all)

This goes for most external hd's used on mac, although its almost always the seagate hds that have an issue. When you buy a hd for your mac make sure you format it to the mac before putting information on it. heres how. 1. (command and space bar) 2. type in disk utility 3. click on the external hd, not your mac hd 4. click on erase, used to be called format on really old macs 5. click on format type "osx journaled" is fine, google the other options if you really want to know what they all do. 6. give it a new name and hit "erase" it is now formatted for macos

advice: if you use your device on multiple computers, format to mac first because it will still show on windows computers but msdos or other formats don't always show on macs. If you have a hd that has always been working on your mac then you did any software updates or you plugged it into a windows pc and now its not showing on your mac. you have to reformat it to the mac.

the answer everyones been waiting for... most mac users have a windows pc somewhere hidden in a closet or their parents still are using one and you just happen to be living in their basement with the computer in reach, you're in luck. Essentially you have to reformat the hd on a windows first then reformat it back to mac. Plug it into the windows, click around for 5 minutes reacquainting yourself with the nostalgia of how the heck did you ever use one of these, until you find the format button. After playing the old ms dos games still hidden on the pc like hero gold, lemmings, and minecraft format your hd. First format it back to default settings, clicking the quick reformat box makes it go faster and usually doesn't change the results. Even if the hd is brand new never used just out of the box and it isn't showing on mac, yes you still may need to get into the old cursed windows pc and format to default settings. Once you format to default plug it back into mac and erase/format to mac (see paragraph 2). If the hd still isn't showing on mac, go back to your windows, play some solitaire, and reformat the disk again. This time try not using the quick format, or try some of the other formats, they go quick. I just had to do this with a new 8tb seagate and made the mistake of not hitting the quick format, 30 minutes later I hit cancel and quick format. worked just fine.

*if you have important pictures of your ex data files on your hd that is now not showing up, make sure to save it elsewhere before erasing/formatting the hd. This will have to be done through the windows computer. yes it may corrupt your other hd in the process or download a virus or who knows, just try to minimize your windows exposure and finish the hd issues, unplug them, and make sure it all worked before spending the rest of the day week month playing your old roller coaster tycoon or sims obsession from childhood.

if none of this works, do what you used to do on windows, click around until something important-looking shows up, click around some more until it works. (how do you think I figured all this out in the first place)

Hi, I just got an 8tb WD and I'm having the same issue, it doesn't show anywhere, were you able to solve this issue? the drive is new and worked on my linux pc, its formatted ntfs as usual(which I prefer to keep) maybe this is the reason? too big of a ntfs drive to be seen?

Hi Guys,

I had this same problem on my Seagate 2TB Backup Plus Portable Drive. It opened on my mid 2007 iMac (only 4Gb of Ram) but wasn't opening on my Mid-2012 Macbook Pro (2.9Ghz Intel Core i7, with 8Gb memory 1600Mhz DDR3).

Freaks me out if I have to 'unplug' without safely ejecting. Especially if the light on the External Drive is on AND the drive seems to be loading.

I went to About This Mac > System Report > USD --> it did in fact pick up the 3.0 USB BUS.

Yet, still no show in Finder.

I opened up Disk Utility and lo and behold my External Drive showed up. Went back to Finder and thankfully was able to access the Drive. Maybe it just takes some time. Just don't unplug it

Greetings lllaass,

What does my System Report mean?

External drives do not show an Icon on the dektop unless you have changed a setting in Finder preferences:

Finder > Preferences > General

.

Note that this setting is not in System Preferences, but a setting on the Finder Menu.

Does The drive appear in the sidebar of Disk Utility?

If it does, what kind of drive does it say it is?

PS: there is no software incompatibility reason, in general, for it NOT to show up.

One day my external drives stopped showing up under "Devices" -- all of them. They showed up in Disk Utility, thank goodness. I worked around it by going into Finder Preferences / General / Show these items on the desktop (checked the box next to "External Disks").

I tried turning computer on and off. No luck.

Figured it out -- In the Finder window, if you roll and hover with the cursor over "Devices," to the right, in grey, the word "Show" will appear. Click on "Show" and those external drives show up again. If you hover with your cursor over "Devices" again, the word "Hide" appears in grey. Click on "Hide" and the drives disappear.

I had accidentally clicked on "Hide." Duh...

I have this same problem, too. For weeks this drive kept giving me occasional error message like "Disk failed to eject properly, etc., etc." even when I didn't even touch it and was still using it! It is one of those Seagate wireless jobs with bluetooth, 500GB. Now it won't work, mount, show up, or even pretend anything on any computer it's connected to. It doesn't show up in Disk Utility, or my Finder to the left, and I've tried the Hide/Show trick. No luck.

Can anyone help? I have that little HD packed to its 500GB gills with stuff.

rwrarsmith -

Does your computer have another means to connect to a computer besides wireless? Most hard drives offer more than one method of connectivity. Try using an interface that doesn't require a wireless connection. This will eliminate wireless connectivity from the equation and test to see if the drive portion is working properly.

Next, do you have access to another computer to test the drive with? If it won't mount onto any computer system, you've probably got a malfunctioning drive. If it won't mount onto any system you can't really do much with it. All troubleshooting approaches require the ability to talk to the drive in some form or another.

Pmiles - sorry it's taken so long to get back to you. I wasn't using wireless to connect in the first place. The way I use this drive is wired to transfer files, and wireless to consume media, if that makes sense. I did finally get it to work, though. My solution was to connect it to electrical power while it was connected to the laptop. This drive should already have a charge AND should draw power from the computer, so normally this is not how I would use it. Why it worked, I have no idea. Perhaps the charged power had run out (it HAD been a long time since I'd charged it), and maybe it wasn't drawing enough power via the USB to work.

In any event it works now, though frankly, the experience has made me trust the drive less. I'm disappointed in the quality of the wireless connection because it tends to drop the connection mid-movie or TV show, even though it is only inches away from my iPhone or iPad. I may sell it in favour of a larger drive without wireless connectivity. I've discovered that I don't use it that way anyway.

Thanks for your help!

Sometimes USB 1.1 and 2 ports do not provide enough power for USB accessories.

Thread hijack 😟

Too many problems with bus-powered drive devices, and you would be better served in the MacBook Pro forum.

MacBook Pro

Networking Issues

MacPerformance

Thanks for this rwraysmith. Mine WAS plugged into the electrical socket, and with the blue light on the drive showing I assumed it was all good. I also tried connecting it to my older macbook pro which worked. But after reading your post I tried the electrical cord in another power outlet and discovered that was the problem. The blue light must have only been from the usb power which is obviously not enough to power the drive correctly! Still don't understand why it worked on the 2011 mb pro but not on the 2013 mb pro though. ?!

If you're a Mac user setting up or erasing this drive up with your computer is super easy follow these steps.
1. Plug in the the drive
2. Open up disk utility found in your applications folder inside the utilities folder
3. Next select the newly plugged in a drive and on the right-hand side you should see partition click on that.
4. Then inside that screen on the partition layout drop-down choose how many partitions you'd like to set up. I generally go with one partition and just use folders to organize my files.
5. Then on the right-hand side you can name the partitions and select the format. If you are transferring video files I highly recommend you choose Mac OS Extended (If you want to use it with Time Machine this is the choice you need to make) as it can handle files over 4GB. Sometimes it's good to make two partitions and one using "MS-DOS fat" or "ExFat" if you might be transferring files to and from a Windows machine. The reason is Windows machines and Macs can read and write to the "MS-DOS fat" format but your files will need to be under 4 GB each as that's the maximum file size it can handle.***6. One thing you need to do though when you re-formatting the drive is go to the option button under partition In the disk utility application. You need to select GUID partition table. That way it will be bootable by Mac OS.7. Then click apply and your Mac will create all the partitions you wanted and you're good to go.
*** The ExFat format is new to Mac OSX 10.9 Mavericks and doesn't have a 4gb file size limit the "MS-DOS fat" or Fat32 does but not all devices like cameras & digital devices can't read or write to it.
I hope this helps and be sure to always have backups of your important data. Take it from somebody was lost a lot of data to hard drive failures always backup and Time Machine is so transparent if you're using a Mac you should be using Time Machine.