Where did my External Hard Drive Icon Go?

[Trudijane]

Hi,
My external hard disk icon has been pretty temperamental. It's plugged in and sometimes the icon shows up and I mainly use it to back-up everything on my computer.

Sometimes when I plug or unplug on either side it miraculously shows up and it's fine. I just got a new computer and my consultant told me to back up everything on my old computer to the external drive.

However, now, the icon doesn't want to show up so I can do this. I've unplugged, replugged, restarted, etc.

Yesterday it was there, and there was an error so I wanted to try and back up again. I can feel the Drive vibrating, but now icon is showing up on my desktop.

Is there some special way I can see it???
Thanks,
Trudijane

 

[spinnerlys]

Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility

And sometimes the following helped me with the proper mounting of external HDDs:

Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)​

 

[brendalana]

Open Finder Preferences > General...

Tick "External disks..."

 

[joaoferro99]

try techtool or diskwarrior. sounds like your file system is not stable at all.