Discover the world of external hard drives for Mac. Waves bundle free. Compare portable, USB and external hard drive models for office and home and shop online. How do you upgrade the hard drive in the 'Mid-2009' through 'Mid-2012' Unibody. As a result, they only can be externally differentiated by the Serial Number.

Advertisement Most of us use external hard drives and USB flash drives from time to time. You or buy a bigger MacBook to reduce your reliance on external drives, but they’re still a necessary evil. It can be a frustrating experience when your external hard drive doesn’t show up (or misbehaves in another way). Fortunately, there’s a long list of fixes you can try to isolate and hopefully fix your issue fairly quickly. In some instances you might find that it’s impossible to recover your drive.

This is why the is so important. If you’re having more serious problems with getting your Macbook Air to book, check out this. If Why isn't your USB device recognized? Partition issues, wrong file systems, dead USB ports, driver issues in Windows, or a dead drive., please refer to the article for that platform.

Before We Begin: Read-Only Volumes and NTFS If your external hard drive is showing up but you can’t write to it, it’s likely using a file system that your Mac cannot write to. Many Windows external drives are formatted to NTFS by default, and macOS doesn’t include an NTFS driver.

In order to write to your drive, you’ll need to install a driver with support for that file system. You can get your hands dirty and Plugging in a USB hard drive and finding out you cannot write to it is frustrating, but easy to fix., or by enabling macOS experimental NTFS support. Alternatively, paid options like ($20 per Mac) or ($31 for all home computers) will quickly restore access to your NTFS volumes. Connect Your Drive and Check /Volumes/ All connected and mounted volumes will show up in your /Volumes/ folder. Launch Finder and in the menu bar, click Go > Go to Folder. Then type /Volumes/ and hit Enter.

You’ll be taken to a folder that shows you all mounted drives and disk images. If you find your drive here, try accessing it. If you’re used to seeing (or would rather see) your drive appear on your desktop, launch Finder and in the menu bar head to Finder > Preferences > General. Check the boxes to determine which drives show up on your desktop. Check Disk Utility Launch Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility ().

This system utility lists all connected drives, with mounted or unmounted partitions listed below. If your drive shows up but the partition isn’t mounted (shown grayed out), try right-clicking the partition and choosing Mount. If your drive still isn’t accessible, you might want to try selecting the drive or affected partition then clicking First Aid.

Disk Utility will check the volume for problems, and if it detects any you’ll be given the option to Repair Disk. If the drive isn’t writeable or supported by macOS, First Aid can’t do anything. If your drive appears in Disk Utility but you are unable to mount any partitions, you may still be able to recover data from that drive. There are Did your SSD happen to die? Digital camera SD card corrupted itself? Don't despair — here's what you can do to recover your files on your own., with being two of the best.

If you’re not concerned with your data and simply want the use of your drive back, feel free to use the Erase tool in Disk Utility to create a new partition. Rebuild the Launch Services Database Some users have reported success in getting their previously missing drives to show up by rebuilding the macOS launch services database. As “an API that enables a running application to open other applications or their document files in a way similar to the Finder or the Dock.” You can rebuild the database by downloading and installing free maintenance app. Launch it and input your administrator password so that OnyX can make changes. The app may ask to verify the structure of your desk; click Continue and wait if so. OnyX will appear unresponsive while the process completes. Once OnyX comes back to life, click on the Maintenance tab followed by Rebuilding.