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time machine not configured. will not recognize external hard drive.

My G-drive ev quit working. I went to time machine and could not find the external hard as a back up. So i bought another new external hard drive and same thing.TM does not see the external hard drive. I suspect that TM is the culprit. I can go to TM and it is in the off position so i turn TM on and it goes right back to the off position.

I sure could use some help.

Thanks a bunch for help.

Mac Pro 4,1 early 2009

10.11.3

8 GB memory

Posted on Feb 8, 2016 10:16 AM

Reply
9 replies

Feb 8, 2016 10:30 AM in response to jms54

- Is the drive self-powered, that only powered by the USB bus? If so it could be that the USB port does not provided enough power. You can try a powered USB hub. You can also get a USB pigtail that takes power from to USB ports to the single USB port on the drive like this one.

StarTech.com® 1' USB Y Male To Micro-B Male Cable For External Hard Drive, Black

- Does it show in Disk Utility?

If so what is format? Time Machine need a Mac formatted (extended journaled) drive.

- Does it show in System Profiler under USB? You should see the chipset in the enclosure as well as the HD itself

OS X: About System Information and System Profiler - Apple Support

Feb 8, 2016 11:03 AM in response to jms54

i turn TM on and it goes right back to the off position.

This problem has nothing to do with the drive.

Please launch the Console application in any one of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then take an action that isn't working the way you expect. Select any lines that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Some private information, such as your name or email address, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

When you post the log extract, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

If you have an account on Pastebin, please don't select Private from the Paste Exposure menu on the page, because then no one but you will be able to see it.

time machine not configured. will not recognize external hard drive.

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