how to unpartition an external hard drive mac

Well, a greyed-out, also an unmounted, external disk will cause the disk not showing up on the desktop and in the Finder.ĭid you try to mount the external hard drive in Disk Utility by yourself? Did you use First Aid to repair the disk? If both of them can’t fix the problem, your external hard drive is probably seriously corrupted. What if the external hard drive is greyed-out in Disk Utility? # If the disk is still invisible on Mac’s Disk Utility, the external hard drive is possibly physically damaged and needs to be replaced. There might be some disk corruption or connection problem.ĭo the following steps to make your Mac at least detect the external hard drive:

If, unfortunately, you don’t either see the volumes nor the disks in the Disk Utility. You should be able see the names of your connected external hard disks in the left column now. It may result from the way how you make the Disk Utility show the disks, in Volumes or in Disks. It is relatively rare that your disk disappears in Disk Utility. Mac’s Disk Utility is a built-in disk management tool with which you can open, mount, unmount, eject, repair, format, partition, rename, and recover the detected volumes. How to show the external hard drive in Disk Utility # You can easily access the disk and the files on it from there as well. Then all connected portable drives will be listed in the left sidebar of the Finder. The steps to change the setting is very similar to the ones above: Disabling the external disk’s showing up on the desktop and in the Finder could be a good way to hide the drive from unauthorized users. Many times, it is also possible that you can see the connected external hard drive is on the desktop but not in the Finder. Mac’s Finder is a built-in file management tool and a graphic user interface where you can launch applications and manage files on internal/external disks and network volumes. How to show the external hard drive in Finder # It is easy to make the icon of the external hard drive show up on the desktop again:Īfter the external hard drive’s icon shows up on the desktop, you can open it and access the files directly from there.

If you are connecting your external hard drive to a such Mac, the icon of the external hard drive is hidden. Many people want to keep their Mac’s desktop very organized and tidy, so they don’t like leaving too many icons, documents, pictures or other files on the desktop at all.

How to show the external hard drive on desktop # There are ways to make your removable disk like external hard drives show up again. However, if you can’t see your drive on Mac in one of those places, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your drive is corrupted, resulting in it unrecognizable and unmountable.

How to unpartition an external hard drive mac