MacOS. Disk light is on, but drive will not mount, or show in Disk Utility. What now?

SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE Series
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Model SDPS314-002T

At first, this light would go off and disconnect every time I touched the drive. With trial & error, I discovered that the cheap USB-C cable that shipped with the drive was bad.

I swapped out the cable, but the damage was done. Tried several cables, and different ports on different Macs. No luck.

Any saving this thing? Seriously disappointed in the quality of this product. I lost some important data.

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I suggest running First Aid on the drive to see if it can be repaired. Otherwise, many data recovery tools can sometimes retrieve data from damaged drives.

1 Like
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Thanks for the reply.

I forgot to mention that it doesn’t even show up in Disk Utility, so I can’t repair it.

I installed the SanDisk Recovery app and it couldn’t see the drive either.

Feels like the drive is fried, but willing to try anything to save it.

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Here are some troubleshooting steps you can try to resolve the issue:

  1. Run First Aid in Disk Utility: Open Disk Utility and use the First Aid feature to check for and repair minor errors on your external hard drive.

  2. Use Terminal to Detect, Mount, and Show the Drive: You can open Terminal and use commands such as diskutil list to check if your My Passport drive is recognized by the system. If it appears, you can use other Terminal commands to mount it manually, like sudo diskutil mount /dev/diskX (replace “diskX” with your actual disk identifier). Read also: Fix External Hard Drives Not Showing Up on Mac

  3. Reset the NVRAM (Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory): Resetting the NVRAM can sometimes resolve hardware-related issues on your Mac, including problems with external devices not showing up.

  4. Boot in Safe Mode and Uninstall Third-Party Software: Start your Mac in Safe Mode by turning it on and immediately pressing and holding the Shift key. Safe Mode disables unnecessary startup programs, including third-party apps that could interfere with your external hard drive’s ability to mount. Once in Safe Mode, check if your external drive appears. If it does, identify and uninstall any third-party software that could be causing the issue.

  5. Reformat the Hard Drive (with Caution): If none of the previous steps worked, you may need to reformat the hard drive to Mac OS Extended or APFS. Be sure to back up all data before doing so, as reformatting will erase everything on the drive.