It’s safe to say that USB drives are now an everyday necessity. Amazing, isn’t it? It’s used to store data, transfer information, and divide files.
Sometimes, despite the fact that Flash drives usually work well with Mac, they don’t. No need to panic; it’s a common occurrence.
Once you connect an external hard drive to your Mac through USB, the drive should show up in the Finder. It’s also listed in the Finder’s left-hand column under Locations.
Most likely, the disc has not been formatted properly, is corrupted, or is broken if it is not visible on your Mac.
The Root of Macintosh’s Flash Drive Problem
If your USB flash drive isn’t showing up in Finder on your Mac, there could be a number of causes. The following is a list of possible causes for the issue:
- Controversy Concerning Ports
- Issues with USB formatting
- Concerning the Hard Drive
- Problems with the operating system
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Fixing a Drive that Is Invisible in Finder on A Mac
There are many potential causes if your storage device, be it a hard drive, flash drive, USB drive, or solid-state drive, is not displaying.
It could be something as simple as a defective cable or as complex as an inappropriate format.
Follow these instructions, and perhaps you’ll be able to figure out what’s preventing your external drive from opening on your Mac and resolve the issue.
Modify your settings
Hopefully, there’s a quick solution that will allow you to mount the hard disc on your computer’s desktop.
- Check your desktop settings for the following to ensure that your Mac will display mounted drives.
- The Finder can be accessed by clicking on the Dock icon.
- The Finder can be accessed from the main menu.
- Select Preferences > General and ensure the box next to External Drives is checked.
- If the external drive has already been configured to show up on the desktop, skip ahead to the next section.
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Verify the cable.
- First, make sure it’s plugged in, but we have no doubt you have done that. But the wire could be the source of the issue.
- If the drive isn’t getting enough power, it won’t mount, which is a common problem.
- Verify that the USB-A cable is providing sufficient power to the drive if it is being powered in this way.
- If your Mac is really ancient, you might need to use a USB power cable, the kind that has two USB ports and requires both of them to be hooked into your Mac to provide enough power to the disc.
- Verify that there is no supplementary power source for the drive.
- Change the cord connecting the drive and see if that helps.
Please try a different Mac and then a PC
Next, you should try using the drive with a different Mac. If it does not mount there, the fault is with your Mac; otherwise, it is with the drive.
The following step is to test the drive by connecting it to a computer. If the drive mounts on the PC but not the Mac, you may have found the cause of the issue: the disc is formatted for PCs but not Macs.
Fix your USB drive with some Band-Aids.
- If the USB flash drive appears in Apple’s Disk Utility but fails to fully mount, you can use the system’s integrated First Aid to correct the issues.
- Locate Disk Utility in the Utility subfolder of the Applications folder and click to open it.
- From the Disk Utility menu, choose the USB drive that has become infected.
- Select First Aid from the menu bar, and then hit the Run button.
- Hold tight until the fix is complete.
- If the repair was successful or not, First Aid will let you know in a final status message.