Now connect the drive again and see if something shows up. In the menu bar, click on Errors and Faults to see if anything could indicate why the drive wasn't being detected.

Now open the Terminal app, which is also found in the Utilities folder inside Applications. Type 'diskutil list external' and press Enter again to see if it's gone from the list. You'll see a list of all connected external drives if your see your USB drive there, type in 'diskutil eject disk 2' followed by Enter. Open Terminal from Applications > Utilities, then type 'diskutil list external' without the quotes and hit Enter. Use Terminal: You can also use the diskutil command in Terminal to check for errors and faults with the USB drive, but it also requires you to access the Console app to diagnose the problem. Next, click Unmount, then remove the device and plug it in again. If there are fixable issues, Disk Utility will get the job done. Launch the app with the USB drive connected, select it in the left panel (if it's visible, of course), and click the First Aid tab at the top, followed by Run.

Here are some more issues and their fixes.įix USB Drive Issues: In extreme cases, if your USB drive is corrupted but still salvageable, try using Disk Utility's First Aid function. The problem could also be because of random issues with your PRAM/NVRAM or the USB drive itself. Assuming you've tried the unplug-wait-plug-in-again trick, let's move on to some other common errors and their fixes. Here are some tips to help you fix the USB drive not showing up on Mac issue. However, USB drives are a little different because the root cause might be a number of other things.

The issue is common and can be easily fixed as simple as removing and plugging in the device again, which is sometimes true for things like wired keyboards. That means you can't use it for any task until the issue is resolved. Some times, the computer might not detect the drive properly and the drive name is not showing up on Finder Sidebar. There are many cases that you need to work with peripheral devices like USB drive on a Mac such as creating bootable Windows install USB.

Mac not detecting usb hard drive