external hard drive not showing up in disk utility

But a wrong USB-C cable or adapter would be unstable and affect data transfer. You need to use a USB-C to USB adapter to connect iOS devices, external hard drives, and many of your standard USB accessories to your Mac.

It matters if your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air only has USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) ports. However, once these hardware devices are broken, the external hard drive will not show up in Disk Utility due to the lack of power and data supply. So you can open those removable drives on Mac via USB cables. Similarly, some sd cards, CF cards, and other memory cards are accessed by card readers. Some external hard drives are wrapped in a hard drive case.

Faulty USB cable or external hard disk enclosure It's because your Mac is busy in dealing with the former device. Consequently, another external hard drive connected to the same USB port can't be recognized. You may have improperly ejected a storage device last time. But some standard external hard drives can only be plugged in without workability. For example, The Canon Micro USB port looks like the standard ones. Also, you need to know that not all USB ports are the same. Malfunctioned USB portĮxternal hard drives won't show up in Disk Utility when the USB port is not working, being loose or dusty. Then why this time your external hard drive is not showing up there? If you have known how Mac recognizes an external hard drive, it would be easier to understand.īut to make it more simple for you, we list some common reasons for this issue. Then users can verify, check, repair, erase, partition, rename, encrypt, and unmount volumes and drives there. All connected drives should be listed in Disk Utility. Why is an external hard drive not showing up in Disk Utility?Įxternal hard drive not showing up in Disk Utility will cause panic, because Disk Utility is a built-in disk management program for Mac computers.

External hard drive not showing up in disk utility