MacOS HS cant see my external drive.

[Mikey86uk]

Hey Guys.

Ive had a 3TB external seagate drive connected via USB 3.0 to my iMac for a few months with no issues.

I never power my Mac down, just put it into sleep mode when not in use.

Yesterday I cleaned my desk and my Mac and accidentally knocked the USB cable out and now for some reason the drive doesn't show up on the desktop, in finder or disk utility. Ive also checked system information and its not appearing as connected in the USB section. The blue light lights up on the drive and I can hear the disk spinning but thats it.

Ive tried rebooting my Mac and still no joy and even connected it to a friends Windows laptop and it doesn't show up on that either.

So basically is the drive dead?

Thanks.

 

[mikzn]

does it show in disk utilities? if you can hear it spinning that is good news

 

[casperes1996]

The best way of checking is diskutil list in Terminal. But if it's not even showing up in System Information, it would seem like even though the device is getting power from USB, it's not sending data. You might try a different USB cable, since, if that's the only part that was knocked about and not the hard drive, I see little reason the hard drive should fail.

 

[Fishrrman]

Although USB has been a step forward in some ways, in others it seems to be lacking (when compared to earlier drive connection paradigms like SCSI).

That is to say, in times past, when a drive got disconnected under the classic Mac OS, one could open the old "HDSC Setup" app, and the choose to "update disk drivers" on the drive. This could help get a cranky drive mounted again.

But I've seen NO option for "reinstalling a driver" to USB external devices.
I don't think there has ever been a way to do that, at the user-level.
Perhaps I'm not looking at the right things.

In any case, I've "something to try". It may work. It may not.
But sometimes it does.

Do this:
1. Turn off the iMac, ALL THE WAY OFF
2. Connect the problem drive
3. Power up the iMac and log into the finder
4. If the drive doesn't mount, just.... wait a while.
5. Give it up to 30 minutes or so.

Does this change anything?
Seems to me that when the finder becomes active it will try to mount all the external devices it can.
IF one of those devices WON'T mount, the finder will try to "repair" it if possible.
I've seen this work with USB drives that [previously] had problems mounting.

No promises.
Just something to try.

Closing thought:
A bit of advice based on personal experience.
Get used to turning off the iMac at night.
Boot it back up in the morning.
What does a good night's sleep do for you?

 

[Mikey86uk]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Tried everything above and still no joy.

I had a spare USB 3.0 HDD enclosure so I opened up the Seagate enclosure and removed the drive.

Connected another HDD that works fine using the spare enclosure to the seagate enclosure and I got nothing again.

So, connected the seagate drive to my spare enclosure and the Mac can see it, but once I connect it I get the following error. "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer"

I have tried using First Aid in disk utility but it keeps failing.

What else can I do before I attempt to erase the drive and repartition?

Thanks again.

 

[casperes1996]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Tried everything above and still no joy.

I had a spare USB 3.0 HDD enclosure so I opened up the Seagate enclosure and removed the drive.

Connected another HDD that works fine using the spare enclosure to the seagate enclosure and I got nothing again.

So, connected the seagate drive to my spare enclosure and the Mac can see it, but once I connect it I get the following error. "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer"

I have tried using First Aid in disk utility but it keeps failing.

What else can I do before I attempt to erase the drive and repartition?

Thanks again.

I've never tried it myself, but I've heard people say that any disk that can be saved can be so by Disk Warrior.

You can also run fsck on the drive from Terminal. You may need to run the specific fsck variant aimed at the file system you had on there.