Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

External Hard Drive won't show up AT ALL.

W

Wyat

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 10, 2012
13
0
Washington State
I'm sure this issue is out there.

But my Seagate 1TB EHDD will not show up at all. It's plugged in, there is power to the drive, but it will not show up inFinder, or in Disk Utility.

I had this problem a couple weeks ago, then one day, after 5 minutes of being plugged in, it randomly detected it, and then rans smoothly.

My MacBook is brand new, and my EHDD is a couple years old, but hasn't seen much use.

Does anyone know what is wrong? Is it just my external drive? Are there any sources you guys know of where I can retrieve the information from the drive?
 
When I plug it into my friends Mac, and another friend's PC, it doesn't show up.

On my friends Mac, Time Machine read it, but then that was it. It still wasn't in Finer or anything.
 
I have an older external 750GB seagate drive that I thought was dead, but it turns out it was just a dead A/C adapter.
 
I had this same problem.

I bought a 1TB Western Digital Elements drive.


I would plug it in and would get no response for 5 -10 minutes, and then it would finally read on the drive.

Im not sure if this is a Mountain Lion Issue.

But I know how to to fix it: Reformat the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then the drive becomes responsive as soon as you plug it in.


It seems like the issue is with FAT formats that have capcities over 1TB. I basically used another drive I had to back up the 1TB, then reformatted to the Mac format and re-transferred my files back over and all was good.


Im not sure if this is a Mountain Lion issue or something thats always occurred with FAT formatted drives over 1TB.
 
Justinhub2003 said:
I had this same problem.

I bought a 1TB Western Digital Elements drive.


I would plug it in and would get no response for 5 -10 minutes, and then it would finally read on the drive.

Im not sure if this is a Mountain Lion Issue.

But I know how to to fix it: Reformat the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then the drive becomes responsive as soon as you plug it in.


It seems like the issue is with FAT formats that have capcities over 1TB. I basically used another drive I had to back up the 1TB, then reformatted to the Mac format and re-transferred my files back over and all was good.


Im not sure if this is a Mountain Lion issue or something thats always occurred with FAT formatted drives over 1TB.
Click to expand...

That would format his data...
 
yusukeaoki said:
That would format his data...
Click to expand...

This is why I waited for it to initialize... then copied all the data from the drive to another drive and then re-matted it and then re-copied it back over.


This is the only way I was able to get it to initialize the external drive as soon as I plugged it in.

If its not a huge deal to wait 5 minutes, then leave the drive as is. But when I had my drive formatted to FAT, I was unable to write big files to it as FAT has some sort of limitation to how big a single file can be
 
That did happen a few weeks ago. After like 5 minutes it came up, but lately it hasn't been doing that. And I read somewhere that if your hard drive is acting strangely, you don't want to keep plugging it in.

But I'll give that a shot.

I imagine going through Seagate to retrieve my data would be most secure though yes? Considering their the company with the failing product?
 
Wyat said:
I imagine going through Seagate to retrieve my data would be most secure though yes? Considering their the company with the failing product?
Click to expand...

Seagate most likely isn't going to retrieve your data. They offer a warranty on the drive, but the do not offer any guarantee on the data. It's up to the end user to make sure they've got a backup.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back