external hard drive not showing up on mac disk utility

You can also plug the drive into a Windows machine and run Microsoft's disk repair utility, which will allow the drive to work properly when it's reinserted into a Mac but will usually cause some files to be permanently deleted. In both cases, the problem can be fixed by simply leaving the drive connected to a Mac for somewhere between 10 minutes and three hours. The terminal and Finder may give different results as to which files are visible. The drive will mount and appear in Finder, but some or all files will not be visible in Finder and/or in the terminal.If you run first aid, Disk Utility will display a quite-scary message saying that the drive is broken beyond repair. Disk Utility can see it, but will refuse to remount it. The drive simply does not appear in Finder.Once the improperly-removed exfat drive is reconnected to a Mac, one of a couple things tend to happen to me:

Note that this applies to both user error (ie, you forgot to press the eject button beforehand) as well as software malfunctions (ie, your computer hard crashed while the drive was inserted). Would anybody be able to provide an explanation in case this happens again?ĮxFat drives, in my experience, behave strangely under Mac OS X after they are improperly removed. I checked right after I did that, and still no files. The last thing I did with the drive was unmount/remount using the Terminal. This drive has worked fine before.ĮDIT: I just left the Finder window for the drive open for ~20 minutes, and the files magically appeared. It’s still working fine on other computers regardless. The drive was verified through disk util to be okay, but then after playing with it for a while trying to fix this, disk util said to reformat the drive.Even if I force eject it from the terminal, the light on the external stays on. And, as stated, I can access all of the files using the terminal.

The drive is mounted, it is not empty, it worked on a Windows PC. How do I access my files visually from the Finder?

External hard drive not showing up on mac disk utility