Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
After upgrading from OS X Sierra to OS X High Sierra on my MacBook Air, I can no longer mount and read my external hard drive. During the upgrade, I converted my MacBook hard drive to APFS. My external drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended.
Is the data on my external drive inaccessible now that I have APFS on my computer? Or is there a way to access it?
MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2013), macOS High Sierra (10.13)
After hours and hours of research and testing I solved this for me.
When I plugged in my external hard drive it showed up in my drive in Disk Utility but it was grayed out.
I could not mount my hard drives and it would not let me repair, erase, nor partition them, an old and a new one.
I decided to click on the view button at the top right corner of my disk utility app and I had "Show Only Volumes" selected. So I clicked on "Show All Devices" and this showed me each device the volumes were on. I could now select my external hard drive and I was able to easily repair, erase, and partition my hard drives when I clicked on the device instead of just the volume.
I hope this helps anyone.
Matthew T R! Thank you so much. This totally solved my problem! You're a life saver.
Can you see it in finder? (Not the contents but at least the name)
No I can’t
I solved this problem by restarting my computer with the external hard drive attached.
On reboot the drive appeared as normal. Good Luck
Brilliant.... simple and absolutely brilliant 🙂
That's real
Thank you. I also spent hours on this and also trying to reformat on an old windows 7 machine.
This is so simple but why does apple do **** like this. It is not helpful at all.
Again thanks.
Thank you so much for posting, I have been chasing my tail to find the solution to this! Makes a lot of sense now thinking about it 🙂
Click on View on Top Left of Disk Utility window and then select "Show all Devices".
Then select your external drive and click on mount. Wait for a minute or two, and it should show up again.
try using a third party siftware like paragon ntfs for mac
I may be late, but I fix this problem with my computer. Go to system preferences > NTFS for Mac OSx > turn on paragon NTFS.
External hard drive not mounting Mac
