My cat stepped on my eject key and ejected my external hard drive. I can't get it to show up. Help!

[diane in sf]

The drive seems to be on and running. I looked in the trash immediately and it wasn't there. I've unplugged and replugged it. I've shut down my computer and held the C key down while it rebooted. I've looked repeatedly in the finder and used disk utilities.

Help! Does anyone have any suggestions to make my computer aware of my external drive again???

I am fortunately backed up in the cloud and will try to call Apple help on Friday if no one has a solution, but if anyone's dealt with this problem successfully, I'd be grateful to know what worked!

[uppityperson]

1. That sounds anxiety provoking. Cats!

I've no clue, good luck, and cats! Our overlords.

[NV Whino]

2. First, fire the cat

Then go into "utilities" folder and find disk utility.

If you disk shows up there, you can click on it and tell it to mount. I'm not on my big computer right now, so you will have to look around in the top menu to find the "mount" option.

If it doesn't show up, you may have to take it to an Apple Store.

[diane in sf]

3. thanks, it doesn't show up in disk utility, so looks like its Apple help time.

[LunaSea]

4. Didi you try a restart?

Was the ejected disk your boot disk?
Try booting from the install disk and use the Disk Utility on that, it sometimes functions differently than the HD.

[Dr. Xavier]

5. Shut down and sign out of your computer.

Reboot and restart. If your cat ejected the external Hard Drive, it wasn't totally ejected from the Mac. Its on there and you should have received a warning to eject properly next time. I always get that message but I figure that its totally safe as I have never lost anything. I believe that if you can follow those steps, you'll be okay. Furthermore, if you are backed up in Cloud, does Cloud show the HD?

[trusty elf]

6. You might open the "finder" preferences

and make sure that the box for showing external drives is checked.

Good luck!

[LiberalArkie]

7. I have had my Mac loose .a drive and could not make it find it

I tried to format it etc and diskutil just would not see it. I thought I was going to have to just throw it away. I found this article and tried this method and it worked on the drive and I was able to reformat and save it..


http://www.macissues.com/2014/04/05/how-to-fix-deep-formatting-problems-with-os-x-drives/

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Which model ? Which version of OS ?

DON'T hold down the C key on restart -- that's to boot from a CD ! Try rebooting with the option key, shift key, or command-R keys down.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201255 Lists other options -- note option-D in particular.