external hard drive not showing in disk utility

For instance, external hard drives won’t work on Mac because of an incompatible USB driver. The outdated firmware and software results in various hardware issues. Solution 4: Check for hardware and software updates And you can run First Aid in Disk Utility manually if you doubt any disk error. Then the external hard drive should show up on the desktop of your Mac. Select that task and click the “Force a process to quit” button at the upper left to stop it. (If your external hard drive is exFAT formatted, then it should be “fsck_exfat”.) Open this tool and check if there is any process named “fsck_hfs” or something similar. Then you will see Activity Monitor there. Go and check it in the Mac Task Manager - Activity Monitor.Ĭlick the Launchpad and find the Other folder. If you see the external hard drive there but it is not showing up in Disk Utility, the hard drive may be under repair by macOS. Go to Applications > Utilities > System Information.Ĭlick “USB” on the left panel, and check the external hard drive information. System information is where you can find all information of external devices, the software, hardware, and network on your Mac. Where else you can find this external hard drive then? Probably, you should check it in the System information. And it won’t appear even after a re-startup. You connect an external hard drive to a Mac computer but it is not showing up in Disk Utility. # Solution 3: Check the external hard drive in System Information Or you can press and hold the power button and, when a dialog box appears, click the Restart or press R. Rebooting will refresh your macOS’s tasks. Hopefully, this problem can be easily fixed by restarting. Sometimes, it might be some data damage to your Mac system.

Then you can simply click on it.Ĭheck if you can see the external hard drive in Disk Utility again. Move your mouse and put it on the “External” option. Open Disk Utility after you connect the external hard drive to your Mac. If so, you can try these steps to manually show it up. The external hard drive is not showing up in Disk Utility? You can check if you can see the ‘External’ option at the left sidebar.

Solution 1: Manually show external hard drive in Disk Utility

Ask for help from local technicians or data recovery services.

Run Mac diagnostics to detect hardware issues.

Check for hardware and software updates.

Check the external hard drive in System Information.

Reboot your Mac computer to recognize the external drive again.

Manually show external hard drive in Disk Utility.

I will be sharing with you the some of the feasible solutions that you can try to fix this issue:

External hard drive not showing in disk utility