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Question

Macbook Pro won't recognize external HD anymore

May 3, 2018 12:55PM PDT

Hi,

I have a 1TB Seagate Expansion Portable Drive that I have connected successfully to my laptop (MacBook Pro 2016 running High Sierra 10.13.4) in the past but yesterday when I plugged it in it would not show up. The hard drive works fine with an older laptop that I have at work (MacBook Pro Early 2015 running El Capitan 10.11.6) so I know it is not the cord or the drive. The only difference is that I'm connecting it to my home laptop using a Hyper Drive Hub since that laptop has thunderbolt ports and the one at work doesn't. I checked to see if something was wrong with the hub by plugging my camera into it via USB and the laptop was able to read the camera's memory card just fine.

So far I've tried shutting down/unplugging the laptop and restarting it but that didn't work. The drive does not show up in Disk Utility on my home laptop so I ran the First Aid using the older laptop that I have at work. Nothing came up. Not sure what else to do. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
Did you write
May 3, 2018 1:02PM PDT
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Clarification
May 3, 2018 1:25PM PDT

Correct, it only shows up on the older 2015 macbook. It's completely invisible to the new laptop. However it used to work just fine. Actually my time machine backup for my new laptop is on that drive.

I'll check out the article, thanks.

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Just a small thing.
May 3, 2018 1:28PM PDT

My most common external drive failure is when the power is from the laptop for external HDDs (SSD is usually a non-issue here) and when the laptop is not powered by the charger.

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RE: Just a small thing.
May 3, 2018 1:33PM PDT

Yeah I was using the charger. I actually tried it with the charge cord plugged directly into the laptop and also with it plugged into the hub. No luck.

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Answer
Troubleshooting
May 9, 2018 11:27AM PDT

Hi, in order to check the physical part of the drive, we would like to recommend you to connect the drive directly to the USB port of the Mac, change the cable or connect it to another Mac.

Sometimes the drive does show up in the Terminal even though it is not detected by the Disk Utility, so you can look for it in the Terminal too. Grin

Also, you can contact our technical support, they are very happy to help you.

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RE: Troubleshooting
May 9, 2018 2:47PM PDT

Thanks, it didn't show up in Terminal but I bought a thunderbolt cable and that did the trick. Very weird that it used to work just fine using the USB to Thunderbolt hub and just randomly stopped but it's working now with the cable.