Macbook Pro won't mount External Hardrives

I have a 2014 macbook pro that I recently updated to High Sierra. Ever since the update I have been unable to mount my Seagate Backup Plus Drive. I've tried restarting multiple times, connecting to other computers (which does work, they all mount it just fine) and checking Disk Utility. The drive shows up greyed-out in Disk Utility, pressing mount doesn't do anything. I'm at a loss. I believe it's a problem with my computer and not the drive, since the drive mounts to all other computers I've tried. Any help would be really appreciated

MacBook Pro with Retina display, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3)

Posted on Feb 3, 2018 11:00 AM

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Posted on Feb 3, 2018 12:01 PM

Have you tried to do a "First Aid" on that volume in Disk Utility? What does it say (post the details of this)? If you've already tried this and no problems found, try the following...

Try mounting from command line using "mount" command. Need to know a couple of things:

device name - get this from a "diskutil list" command -- its something like /dev/disk3s3 or whatever

is the partition slice for the problematic drive

file system type - probably HFS+ -- this info will also be shown in the "diskutil list" output but the

actual string is a bit different

So a possible mount command would be (sudo commands will ask for your account password and assume it to be an "admin" type account) -- this is only an example as your situation needs to reflect your disk name and partition and the first "mkdir" command should be a folder that does not already exist:

sudo mkdir /Volumes/Seagate

sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk3s2 /Volumes/Seagate

When you try the mount command you will see some sort of error -- then we can try and figure out what the problem might be.

Good luck...

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18 replies

Feb 5, 2018 8:32 AM in response to Tim Lorenzen

Booted in safe mode then restarted, still not mounting.

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Feb 4, 2018 9:21 AM in response to ahmedburdette

You have several issues:

The Seagate volume is an NTFS volume (used for Windows systems usually) -- you need special software to check/mount those types of volumes, e.g. Paragon or others. If you have this software then the mount command would need to have "-t ntfs" instead of "-t hfs" I think (check with your software provider).

You need a space between the "/dev/disk1s2" and the /Volumes/Seagate... and you also need to enclose the /Volumes/Seagate... in quotes or escape the space character in the volume name -- should be something like "/dev/disk2/Volumes/Seagate Backup Plus Drive" and you also need to make the folder name in "mkdir" command using /Volumes match. Are you certain it's the full name "Seagate Backup Plus Drive" and not just "Seagate"?

What software are you using to backup to this NTFS volume? Did the "Seagate" drive come with software so that you could use it on Mac's?? Unless you want to use this drive on another Windows system you might want to think about formatting it as HFS+ (since that is native to Mac systems but Windows systems would have a problem reading it without third party software) but realize you will loose everything on it when you do this. Is there anything on the drive at all you wish to preserve?

Also please do this in a Terminal window before doing anything else:

diskutil list

and also do

df -kt

so we can see some important information. Also keep asking questions before doing anything that cannot be undone so you understand the issues.

Good luck...

Feb 4, 2018 10:35 PM in response to ahmedburdette

I suspect it’s having issues loading the NTFS kernel extension (kext). Can you try rebooting in safe mode once:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

After you booted I safe mode, just reboot again normally. This will clear some caches and might help.

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Macbook Pro won't mount External Hardrives