Troubleshooting an External Drive Not Showing on Mac

If you have a new external drive that doesn't show up properly wherever you connect it to your Mac, try to fix the problem by using the solutions described below.

The first step is to make sure that everything with the external drive is in order. Check the condition of the USB connector and cable, try to connect a differed drive to the system, or connect this drive to another system and see if it works as intended there. Try rebooting the USB drives by shutting down your Mac computer and starting it back again while also holding the Command+Option+P+R keys on your keyboard. When you hear a sound signal and the screen flashes, release the keys and wait for the boot sequence to finish.

If you've determined that the underlying issue is with your Mac, then hopefully these solutions will be able to help. Start by adjusting the Finder settings as they may have been set to not display hard drives on desktop. Open Finder, select 'Preferences,' and then go to 'General.' See if the 'External disks' option has been enabled. Connect the drive and open a new Finder window to check if it now can be detected.

If the problem persists, users may want to try and mount the external drive manually. Connect the hard drive, go to 'System Preferences' and open 'Disk Utility.' Check to see if the external disk is listed in the left sidebar of the window. Select it and choose 'Mount.' This should have forced the disk to appear under devices in Finder.