Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Alert

External Hard Drive Recognized but didn't show up, why?

Feb 20, 2015 10:31PM PST

Hey Community,

Yesterday I connected my external hard drive to my macbook pro. I wanted to activate the time machine so I have space on my mac. When the time machine automatically came up I forwarded it to connect it to the Time Machine. When the process started I recognized that mac is completely restarting and formatting the hard drive so I searched for any button to cancel the process because I had lots of files in it.

But there was no button so I separated it by pulling the usb cable. Of course the process stopped but after that I tried to connect the hard drive again. Unfortunately it didn't appear anymore.

The disk utility recognizes the external hard drive but I can't see it on the finder. I also went to preferences on finder and checked the box for external hard drives. Still nothing appeared.

Can anyone please help me?

My Macbook pro is OS X Yosemite Version 10.10.2 and the hdd is WD Elements.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014), OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
If DU shows but finder does not
Feb 20, 2015 10:56PM PST
- Collapse -
Time Machine
Feb 21, 2015 4:21AM PST

Your idea of activating Time Machine so that you have space on your Mac is not the way Time Machine works.

I'm guessing that you just took the WD Elements hard drive out of its box and plugged it in. The reason that it worked for you is because it was formatted at FAT32, a universally recognized format that works with just about every computer.

Time Machine, on the other hand, will only work with a disk that is formatted as OS X Extended (Journaled). It will format any disk, that is not already formatted as OS X Extended, so that it can use it.
This is what happened to you.

Time Machine should be used as part of a Backup Routine, it is not an Archive system. Backing up with Time Machine and then deleting the originals leaves you with no backup. External HD's are cheap, buy one for Storage.

Good Luck with recovering the files from the external.

P