External Disk No Longer Showing Up

[p0intblank]

I have two external Western Digital disks and one of them is suddenly not showing up in the Finder. Disk Utility recognizes it as an external drive, but I cannot do anything with it (check, repair permissions, etc.).

Any suggestions?

 

[Unspeaked]

Do you have another computer you could try it with?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

Is it HFS formatted or FAT formatted? If FAT, try plugging it into a PC. If it still doesn't work, you may need to repartition and reformat it.

 

[p0intblank]

The drive worked on my Power Mac G4 at home, but now I have it at college with me on my PowerBook G4. I've tried different USB cables and it still does show up correctly. I really need it to show up again, because my music is on there.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Is it a 2.5" disk (aka a 'portable' size one, that draws all its power from USB,) or a 3.5" disk? (aka a 'desktop' size one, that plugs into wall power separately.)

Being at school, there has to be someone who has a computer you can plug it in to test.

If it's a 'portable' style one, you may need a 'split' USB cable that plugs into two USB ports at the same time when connecting to a laptop, especially an older laptop. (These cables split at the computer end, and use one USB port for power and data, the second port just for power, since on some computers, a single USB port doesn't provide enough power.) You might also try a different USB port on the notebook. I have one portable USB drive that works fine on one of my MacBook Pro's USB ports, but doesn't get enough power to spin up off the other USB port.

 

[p0intblank]

It's a regular 3.5" 7200 RPM drive. It has worked fine on this computer until returning from winter break. I just haven't used it in the past month since I recently got a Mac Pro, which is now at home for security reasons.

But okay, I'll try a different USB port and let you know. Thanks for your help so far.

 

[Unspeaked]

It's a regular 3.5" 7200 RPM drive. It has worked fine on this computer until returning from winter break. I just haven't used it in the past month since I recently got a Mac Pro, which is now at home for security reasons.

But okay, I'll try a different USB port and let you know. Thanks for your help so far.

Have you tried mounting it with disk utility?

Does disk utility show it as the correct size with the correct amount of used/free space?

Sometimes, when a drive is dying, it will show up in disk utility but give false info.

 

[p0intblank]

Alright, I just tried multiple USB ports (Dell monitor hub included) and still no luck. The drive isn't even showing up in Disk Utility anymore. Also the drive spins up fine and I can hear it accessing data as soon as I connect the USB cable. It sounds like it is working... my Mac just can't see it.

Edit: Correction: the disk is showing up in Disk Utility. It wasn't turned on. But still, Finder is not recognizing it.

 

[raxafarian]

try typing the following in terminal:

killall Finder


I find I have to do that sometimes to eject external drives... maybe it'll help to mount one.

 

[p0intblank]

try typing the following in terminal:

killall Finder


I find I have to do that sometimes to eject external drives... maybe it'll help to mount one.

No luck.