My external hard drive suddenly stopped showing up on my Mac, but it contains important files I need to recover. It doesn’t appear in Finder, and I’m looking for safe troubleshooting or data recovery options that won’t erase the drive.
Don’t initialize, erase, or reformat the drive, even if macOS prompts you to.
First, rule out the simple connection problems. Try another cable, another port, and connect the drive directly instead of through a hub. If it has its own power adapter, check that too. Then open Disk Utility and choose View > Show All Devices. If the physical drive appears there but its volume is grayed out, try Mount. I would avoid running First Aid until the important files are copied, since filesystem repairs can make a damaged volume harder to recover in some cases.
Check System Information under USB or Thunderbolt as well. If the Mac detects the hardware there but Finder and Disk Utility do not show a usable volume, recovery software may still be able to scan the device. Disk Drill for Mac is an option for scanning and previewing recoverable files. Save recovered files to a different drive, never back onto the problem drive.
If the drive disconnects repeatedly, makes clicking sounds, takes a long time to appear, or causes the Mac to freeze, stop testing it. Those signs point more toward hardware failure than a simple mounting issue. Repeated scans can put extra stress on a failing drive. For genuinely irreplaceable data, a professional recovery lab is the safer route.
If the drive stays connected reliably, the best approach is to create a byte-for-byte image or clone first, then scan that copy rather than the original. That gives you more than one recovery attempt without continuing to work the damaged disk.
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A drive missing only from Finder is a very different case from one missing everywhere in macOS. Check Finder > Settings > General and Sidebar to confirm “External disks” is enabled. Then run diskutil list in Terminal. That command only lists devices, so it is a safe way to see whether macOS recognizes the disk even when Finder does not.
If the drive appears there, look in Disk Utility for a locked APFS volume. An encrypted volume may need to be unlocked with its password before it can mount. Trying the drive on another Mac can help too, especially if the original Mac recently had an OS or hardware change, but avoid Windows prompts offering to “fix” or format it.
I agree with @epicdev3850 about recovering to another disk. Disk Drill can make sense when the hardware stays connected and the disk is visible at the device level, but software cannot scan a drive the Mac cannot detect at all. In that case, after ruling out the enclosure, cable, power supply, and port, the remaining options are usually replacing the enclosure for a removable SATA drive or using a recovery lab.
Stop the plug-unplug-replug loop before anything else. Every time a marginal drive spins up and drops, you’re spending some of its remaining life, and people tend to do that twenty times while ‘testing.’ If it mounted once during all that fiddling, that was your window to copy the important stuff, not your window to run more diagnostics.
The advice above about imaging the drive first is the right instinct, but Disk Drill’s built-in imaging can choke on a disk that keeps disconnecting mid-read. For a drive that drops in and out, ddgrescue (the ddrescue tool, free, install via Homebrew) is honestly better suited because it’s built to handle read errors and retries without giving up on the whole image. You point it at the raw device, let it grab everything it can, then scan that image with whatever recovery software you like afterward. That keeps the failing hardware out of the loop for the slow part.
One thing nobody’s flagged yet: if it’s a bus-powered 2.5’ drive, try it on a port that actually delivers full power, or use a powered hub, because an underfed drive will show up intermittently and look like a dying disk when it’s really just starving. Cheap thing to rule out. And yeah, @epicdev3850 is right that clicking or repeated freezing means you stop and think about a lab. No software or image trick beats mechanical failure, and the more you run it, the more a lab has to work with later.