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 hard drive case. It's because your Mac is busy in dealing with the former device.įaulty USB cable or external hard disk enclosure 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 work ability. For example, The Canon Micro USB port looks like the standard ones. Also, you need to know that not all the USB ports are the same.
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.Įxternal hard drives won't show up in Disk Utility when the USB port is not working, being loose or dusty.
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. Then, how can you make this external hard drive work again? This article will help you to find an external hard drive that is not showing up in Mac Disk Utility easily. It also happens after you share the same drive between Windows and macOS. Hard drives not working or showing up issues could happen to some best external hard drives like WD, Toshiba, Seagate, etc. However, sometimes you check the connected external hard drive in Disk Utility, it doesn't show up as you thought. When an external hard drive is connected to Mac, it usually would be detected and recognized by Disk Utility.