Why is the External Hard Drive not reading on my Mac? – How to solve it

With the arrival of external hard drives today we have provided one of the largest helps when saving important information due to its large storage capacity, being larger than that of a flash drive.

However, like any component, is prone to failure during its useful life at the time of being used. In the event that something like this happens, we should not get nervous, since it usually happens that computers do not read the device well and here we will teach you how to solve said fault

How can you check if the external hard drive is connected properly?

These external storage devices high-capacity, they are the same as a hard drive, only they have the difference of being portable and do not need a computer to work. But of course, these usually present damage when they are not used properly or their maintenance is neglected.

An external hard drive can have different types of failures that make the information saved is lost or deleted without any cause. This is why knowing if the hard drive is damaged in order to repair these failures as quickly as possible is the most crucial thing in order not to lose the information or the entire external hard drive.

These faults are can present in the software and we will notice it at the moment. If it is a reading failure, the computer system itself will indicate when the disk will not be read by showing it on the screen, in the case of a hardware failure, it will not show any interaction through the system. Here we will show you how to solve these errors.

from your software

When it comes to failures from the software, we are talking about the computer system that sometimes it happens that it does not read external devices accurately due to having a bad driver installed. We will show you what the connection problems are and their solutions:

• If your failure is due to compatibility problems in the file formats, you can resort to changing the format of the disk to make it compatible. Since NTFS files only for Windows for Mac would cause reading problems, use files HFS+, FAT32 o exFAT They are compatible for both Mac and Windows.
• A very common problem is the letter that the unit has, since the computer may already have a disk with the same letter and will not read the other. For this you must change it, entering the magnifying glass of your Mac, look for ‘Disk Utility’ and select the disk you want to change, renamed it to another letter
• If when you connect your external drive the USB ports does not read it, you can proceed to update them. To do this, you must go to System Preferences and in the Software Updates all the updates will be, you will have to choose the ports to solve this problem

To avoid these problems, Apple always recommends its users to keep their Mac computer up to date at all times, in order to be prevented from problems like this or another that u may present.

Checking it from the hardware

Not only do failures usually happen on a Software scale, but also may get to hardware thus bringing worse problems than the previous ones. To the point of being able to burn the external HDD if it was installed wrong. These problems can be:

• It may happen that your hard drive does not have the power switch on, since it has power cables that must be active at all times to operate the device. In this case, proceed to turn it on.
• Proceed to see if your device reads on another computer, if so. Verify that the cables of the USB ports are well connected, since the excessive use of these can cause them to disconnect
• If it reads but doesn’t open, you can proceed with Formatting your external hard drive so that it can be accessed this way.

What can you do if the connection problem is in the cable?

One of the connection problems that has happened to many with their hard drive is that the cable it has is damaged and that is why the computer cannot do the job of accessing it. The most effective solution is to change the cable that it has for a better one, opt for an eSATA type cable, since they are resistant and last longer.

What is the best method to fix connection errors within your MAC system?

In case the solutions that we have provided here have not helped you, you can make use of of Mac SMC management system to perform the connection error correction of your external hard drive. Here we explain how to do a Reset on this system.

Perform a reset of the SMC system management control

This is one of the best functions after everything has not worked and this is the last option that we have. to start reset SMC system management you must:

• Turn off the equipment and press the keys ‘Control+option+right shift’
• You must be like this for 10 minutes keeping the buttons pressed next to the power button.
• After this, turn on the normal computer. If when connecting the hard drive, it manages to read it then you have already solved the problem