I have a drive that won't mount on the Mac, however, when trying to recover the data, third party software can read my files. Why can't I do this without the extra software and be able to back up my information?
iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012), OS X El Capitan (10.11.4)
You'd be better off using the pre installed Time Machine app for backing up data to an external drive.
Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac - Apple Support
That way you don't have to deal with third party software.
I'm so sorry I didn't explain properly. This is an external drive. It shows the drive in Disk Utility, but it's greyed out and won't mount. All I am looking for is a way to get my files off of that drive and on to another.
shutdown, detach the drive, reboot into safe mode
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262
reattach the drive.
open disk utility.
if the drive is still greyed out check the format of the drive. If it's formatted outside of a mac format there will be inherent limitations with Mac OS X.
if the drive is shown on the desktop select it then press CMD+i
note the format type
what is it?
One possibility is that it's an encrypted drive then you need to unlock it:
Disk Utility > File > Unlock ...
and then mount it.
C.
no it's not encrypted or locked. It's just an external drive where I keep my design files.
Unmountable drive on Mac
