I have just upgraded to yosemite and my external hard drive (Iomega, usb self powered) which I use to store all my professional work on is not being recognized. I cannot revert to mavericks as I dont have a time machine backup and I dont want to reformat the hard drive as I will lose over 2 years of work! What can I do?
Is the drive recognized in Disk Utility?
Disk Utility resides in your Mac's Utilities folder.
I can see it there, but its greyed out and the name of the hard drive isnt as I had it set if that makes sense. It wont allow it to repair either.
You wrote that the drive is "USB self powered". I'm not sure I understand that to mean that it draws its power from the USB port, or if it has its own power supply that is plugged in to a wall socket.
Do you have another Mac you could use, to determine if it recognizes the drive?
Thanks John,
Yes I mean it is powered just by the USB cable, no mains power needed. I have tried it with different ports and leads, no luck. Have tried it on a different machine running system before mavericks and all works fine on that. It is just on my machine with yosemite.
USB powered hard disk drives can be hit and miss. Obviously something changed with Yosemite, but the most important thing for you is to make sure the data contained on that Time Machine backup is intact. I recommend you purchase a replacement hard disk drive with its own power supply (not USB powered), and using Carbon Copy Cloner or the equivalent, "clone" the existing one's content to the replacement. Time Machine will continue to function normally with the new drive, as if nothing had changed.
Alternately, you can remove the existing hard disk from its enclosure and purchase a replacement enclosure with its own power supply. Suitable hard disk drive enclosures are available for less than $10. Replacement is simple and a Philips screwdriver is the usual tool required.
The best idea is to do both. Maintaining two (or more) Time Machine backups in rotation is a valuable backup strategy.
I have the same problem using a 2011 MBP 15" Intel 17, 8 gig with a new cinema display and a recent download of Yosemite (7 days ago)
I have two pherical usb hard drives both by lacie
The more recent 1T Orange usb hard rives mounts fine and is operational.
However the older 2011 1T Rugged Safe (fingerprint scanner to open) by laice (both purchased from the apple store will not mount correctly). On connection or start up by both cable types supplied the icon appears after reconnecting again, then my use of the fingerprint scanner sends the icon off screen, reconnect again and the opening window appears with a choice set up or open and choose opening by name and password as opposed to using the fingerprint scanner. No luck, the icon disappears off screen also. Not cool
Sometimes this hard drive just sits there no icon on screen and alternates with its led changing from flashing green to red and clicks like a missed connection.
This unit worked fine with Mavericks but Yosemite no go. Have tried lace support by getting a ticket and cannot get a response from them so far thats been 6 days waiting Great support AH? These units are both still under their 3 year warranty!
Anyone with the same or found a fix please post.
Needless to say I have a lot of business data in there
I use a time machine back up but chose not to back up these two drives in there.
Andrew
My external drive that is powered by its own power cable was doing the same thing. I found that if I unplugged it for 10-15 seconds then replugged it in the drive was recognized in Finder and fully functional. Not sure if it will stay this way, but this fixed it and allowed me to run my Time Machine backup.
I have a 1TB Iomega drive that I had to be moved to a different enclosure as the USB connector broke.
It is working fine with Yosemite but it is no longer using the original Iomega firmware it came with as the new generic enclosure would only see 280MB!
All the data was los as I had to reformat the drive, thank god I had another back-up
This could be similar to the problem that Western Digital had with Mavericks as WD drives had a defective firmware
I had a similar problem after upgrading to Yosemite. It was with a 4tb mirrored RAID connected by Firewire. At first I thought it was a problem with electronics that held the two hitachi 2TB drives. So I went out and purchased a USB dock and got the message that the drives could not be read. I downloaded the 10.6 file from this site http://support.g-technology.com/support/g-speed-es-pro-downloads. And my drives are now visible and operating as they were pre Yosemite.
Hi,
I have almost the same problem with my Apple Macbook Air 13', with a iMac 21.5' and my toshiba 1TB external hard disk.
Since when I upgrade to yosemite the hard disk is mounted for few seconds and then appears: "the disk was not ejected properly".
I initialised it, backup and analyse it with test disk, but nothing worked.
On the contrary it's still working fine on Maveriks.
The hard disk has not even 6 months of life.
Any ideas?
Thank you!
Just purchased a brand new iMac after having an iMac purchased in 2006 for the past 8 years. Had no idea this would be an issue, but my 1TB WD Smart Book is having similar issues being read by the iMac using Yosemite.
Here's what happens with me:
The WD SmartWare disc always mounts and I can always unlock the drive. Once I unlock the drive, I can see everything fine. As soon as the computer goes to sleep and I turn it back on, I can't see anything on the drive. The drive is still mounted on the desktop, but when I double-click it, the finder window is empty. I have to restart the computer and then everything works again, but as soon as the computer sleeps and is reawakened I'm up a creek without a paddle.
I have my iTunes and iPhoto in the external drive, and have always had it that way to save space on the computer, so this is a sucky situation.
APPLE PLEASE ADDRESS THIS PROBLEM!!!!!
Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.
Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.
Or you can use your Apple ID to register with this site and go the Apple BugReporter. Supposedly you will get an answer if you submit feedback.
Thanks, Eric. Just sent the Apple team the feedback report. This is so frustrating. Right now, I am simply not allowing the hard drive to sleep and that seems to keep the external drive accessible on the Mac.
Not sure this will help but I just read an article which states that if you have an external drive that has the capability to sleep on its own when not in use that it can conflict with the Apple OS energy feature of "put hard drive to sleep when possible". I had a similar issue using a USB3 drive as my TM so I'm now testing the theory. In my case I removed the check for that feature in the energy pane because my drive has a built in power down mode. The Apple OS now assumes the drive is always on since I have the boxed uncheck (but it really is powered down) so now when trying to access the drive no luck. I have now rechecked the box and the drive still powers down but now wakes up since now the OS is sending a signal to be awake. I will see what happens in the next 1-2 days.
Same problem here.
Just plugged in my WD "My Passport" USB power HD to do my first backup since upgrading from Mav to Yos. The HD isn't recognised and doesn't show in finder. It worked perfectly with Mav.
Strangely I have just pulled the USB lead out and I get the "Time Machine Disk Not Ejected Properly" warning!! So it is half recognised!
I send feedback via the link supplied by one of the posters - suggest you all do the same.
External hard drive not working on yosemite
