External ssd boot drive won't mount

[Pipper99]

i just moved to a new house today, and my Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB SSD, which I use as my startup disk, doesn't mount. On first boot today,my 2014 iMac booted to my internal fusion drive, and the Samsung appeared as a drive on my desktop. I chose the samsung as my startup disk and rebooted, but the iMac booted to the fusion drive again, and the Samsung no longer appears on the desktop, in the finder, or in disk utility. I checked the thunderbolt connections, switched to the other thunderbolt port, unplugged and reinserted the thunderbolt cables several times, rebooted numerous times, disconnected and reconnected all attached devices and power cords, shut everything down and left it alone for a couple of hours, repaired disk permissions on the fusion drive, to no avail. Did my thunderbolt cable get damaged in the move? Everything worked normally last night before the move. I hope that the ssd didn't go bad. I back up to backblaze and crash plan every day, but I hope that I don't have to restore from those.

 

[Fishrrman]

Some thoughts, might be of use, might not...

Can you open the enclosure that the SSD is currently housed in?

If so, you might take the SSD out, and try it in a USB3/SATA docking station, or perhaps connect it to a USB3/SATA "dongle-type" adapter.

....And see if the drive will mount up on the desktop that way.

That is to say, the problem could be localized to the enclosure, rather than to the drive itself.
The only way to ascertain this is to try a different enclosure or dock...

 

[Pipper99]

Some thoughts, might be of use, might not...

Can you open the enclosure that the SSD is currently housed in?

If so, you might take the SSD out, and try it in a USB3/SATA docking station, or perhaps connect it to a USB3/SATA "dongle-type" adapter.

....And see if the drive will mount up on the desktop that way.

That is to say, the problem could be localized to the enclosure, rather than to the drive itself.
The only way to ascertain this is to try a different enclosure or dock...

I will give that a try. I'll open it and check to see if the drive is fully connected, then try another enclosure. Thanks so much. I do think that it's probably the cable or the enclosure (at least, I hope so)