I am running Sierra 10.12.4 on a MacBook Air and am trying to use a new external hard drive from Seagate and want to use it with Time Machine. When I open Disk utility the disk just spins. Why won't it load the new disk? Will it also load the MacBook air hard drive?
MacBook Air, macOS Sierra (10.12.4)
Same problem here but I'm not using an external disk, instead I mounted a DMG on a network share, and it's actually the Time Machine disk image. The processes fsck_hfs and diskimages-helper are running so I'm guessing that the image is being error checked and that is causing Disk Utility to be stuck "Loading disks".
Hello and welcome to Apple Support Communities, trailgazer.
If I understand your post correctly, you're connecting an external drive via USB to your MacBook Air but when you go into Disk Utility the drive is not recognized and just spins. I'd like to help.
Try the steps listed here:
macOS Sierra: If a USB device isn’t working
Once the drive is loading properly, you can find the Time Machine steps here:
Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac
If you have any further issues backing up with Time Machine, this article can help:
If you can‘t back up or restore your Mac using Time Machine
Let us know if that resolves this issue for you.
Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities. Take care.
Thanks, I didn't get this response till after my problem was solved. What I did was to do a safe mode startup of my MacBook Air. That allowed the disk utility to load the disks. I then restarted not in safe mode and the disks loaded just fine. I was then able to navigate reformatting and partitioning the disk and getting Time Machine to work with it. I guess there was a bug in the machine that got cleaned out with a safe mode startup.
Disk utility stuck on Loading Disks
