Try to re-plug the external hard drive.Make sure the external hard drive is supplied with power.Since a good connection is a basic condition for secondary hard drives working on the Mac, we need to try these things step by step. just because the drive is not properly connected. It turns out that most of the time, Mac doesn't recognize external hard drives, USB flash drives, pen drives, SD cards, etc. Mac not recognizing external hard drive: Check the connectionsįirst things first.

Does Mac recognize the file system of the external hard drive successfully?.Does Mac read and recognize the partition information of this hard drive?.Is the macOS 12 bug causing your Mac not to recognize the external hard drive?.Is your Mac set to show up mounted external drives on the Finder and desktop?.Is your external hard drive properly connected for data transferring and power supply?.However, if one or more steps above fail, the external hard drive would not be recognized by Mac successfully. Your Mac has done so many works to recognize an external storage device, while you just simply plug the external drive into the USB port. But to make it convenient for users to access the data on the drive, it will check the system preferences and decide if users want to automatically mount and show the external hard drive on the desktop and in the finder.Īmazing, right? You probably never know the details. Meanwhile, other programs get notified that there is a new volume available. Going so far, macOS has recognized the external hard drive. Step 5: Mac shows the external hard drive for users.

So let's take a closer look at how macOS recognizes an external hard drive. When your Seagate, WD my passport, Toshiba, or other external hard drive is not recognized by Mac, the first thing is to know which part of the recognition process goes wrong. Read more > Overview of macOS recognizing an external hard drive This post explains why you encounter the external hard drive not mounting on the M1 Mac issue and how to make your Samsung external SSD work again. How to Fix Samsung External SSD Not Working on Apple Silicon M1 Mac?

Get data back when the external hard drive is not working on Mac.

Make external hard drive recognized by Mac again.

Know why macOS doesn't recognize the external hard drive.

Learn how Mac accesses an external drive.

You will find it helpful for the seem-to-be-dead USB ports on Macs running macOS Monterey. How to make Mac detect the external hard drive again? We offer a detailed guide in this post to fix the Mac not recognizing the external hard drive issue. Recently this issue affects some Mac models after updating to macOS 12 Monterey as well. Whether you are using MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or iMac, strangely, sometimes the Mac can't recognize the external hard drive that you plug into.

Where to find external drive on mac