Nov 08, 2019 Your Mac might enter safe sleep if your battery begins to run low, or your computer is left idle for a long time. Safe sleep copies the contents of memory to your startup drive and powers down the computer, allowing you to pick up where you left off without losing your work. To wake your Mac from safe sleep, press its power button. Nov 14, 2019 It helps to verify and repair a range of issues related to startup HD and external drive problems. If you are able to fix the hard drive or SSD in your Mac (or an external drive) using Disk Utility you will hopefully be able to recover your files. To run Fist Aid on an external hard drive: Open Disk Utility. Using a third-party disk utility that allows you to see Macintosh formatted volumes is an alternative to using FAT32 file system for the external hard drive. MacOS to MacOS: Some Seagate external drives, such as the FreeAgent Go for Mac and FreeAgent Desk for Mac, come formatted in MacOS Extended format, which is supported by Mac OS 8.1 and later.
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Jun 08, 2020 • Filed to: Solve Mac Problems • Proven solutions
There is no doubt that getting quick access to the Mac HD directory can be quite helpful in many situations. You can easily access several folders, such as System, Users, Applications, and Library. All these folders contain data that any Mac user access on a regular basis. Sadly, macOS High Sierra may not display you the Macintosh HD folder on your desktop or Finder by default. It makes access to files difficult.
The good news is that there are some ways to show the hard drive on Mac. Here, in this post, you will get to learn that and also, you get to know how to find the external hard drive on Mac.
Part 1. Why You Can't See Hard Drive on Mac?
Well, there are a number of reasons why you can’t see the hard drive on your Mac. Here, we are going to mention the most common ones:
- Preference Issue: You may have not set preferences that make the hard drive visible on your Mac Finder or desktop.
- Connector Issue: It might be the case that you fail to connect the hard drive to your Mac USB port correctly. And maybe cable you’re using for connection is damaged or non-functional.
- Corruption of File system: It might also case that file system of the hard drive is corrupt due to bad sectors, logical errors, etc. Sometimes, your hard drive file system damage leads to non-mounting HD in Finder.
- Hard drive failure: It might be the case that your drive is physically damaged due to component failure, head crash, or etc.
Part 2. How to Show Hard Drive Icon on Mac Desktop?
It is the Finder’s job for displaying the desktop and its icons, which include storage devices icon too. You can show or hide Mac main hard drive from the desktop of your Mac with ease and all you need to do is to adjust some of Finder options. If you want to keep your hard drives icon on the desktop so that you can access the data easily, then here’s what you have to do to show HD on Mac.
To begin with, you need to first have the Finder option in the foreground. For this, check if there is the word “Finder” in your Mac menu bar. If no, then all you have to do is to tap on the “Finder” icon from Dock of your Mac to appear it to the foreground.
Once you are able to do it, follow the below steps to show the hard drive on Mac desktop:
Mac Os See What Programs Are Using Hard Drive Software
- Go to the Menu bar, and then, move to “Finder”. Next, click on the “Preferences” option.
- Next, select the “General” tab when the Finder preferences window appears on your Mac screen.
- After that, check the box “Hard disks” under “Show these items on the desktop”.
- Finally, Mac hard drive icon should now appear on your desktop as shown in the below figure.
As you can see how much it is easy to show and hide Mac hard disks or drives on your desktop. Whenever you want quick access to the data on your Mac, all you have to do is to double-click on your Mac HD drive from the desktop and you’ll be navigated to place where all of your Mac data is stored.
Part 3. How to Find External Hard Drive on Mac?
Is your Mac not detecting the external hard drive? In many cases, an external hard drive doesn’t show up on your Mac. There is no doubt that it is quite frustrating, especially when you want to transfer something very important right then. Besides this, there can be a change that data present on an external hard drive is corrupt, which is one of the reasons why your Mac can’t detect an external drive.
The good news is that there are some solutions that can help you to come out of this problem with ease. Let’s give a look at them:
1. Mount the External Hard Drive on Mac
It could be the case that your Mac already detects an external hard drive, but it just not showing its icon on your desktop screen. If it is the case, then you can easily mount and access your drive again and all you have to do is to follow the below steps:
- To start with, move to Finder menu and here, choose Preferences.
- In the Finder preferences window, choose the General tab.
- Here, you need to make sure that “External disks” option under “Show these items on the desktop” is ticked.
Also, you can set your Mac to display external hard drive in Finder. For this, go to “Finder”>” Preferences”>” Sidebar”. Here, you need to tick the option “External disks” under “Locations” menu.
This method will probably help you to show the connected external hard drive on your Mac. If it doesn’t, then you can go for the next solution. And if you need to make a USB flash drive detected, the solutions might be more feasible: Fix USB not showing up on Mac.
2. Launch Disk Utility to Run First Aid
There might be a case that your external hard drive is going through some problems you are unaware of it. In this case, you can try to resolve them yourself using Disk Utility to run First Aid tool. Afterward, you can even access your files. The tool will inspect the disk for issues and errors and then, try to repair as required. It is quite helpful when it comes to verifying and repairing a wide range of problems related to external and HD drive.
Here is the step-by-step guide on how you can run First Aid on your external hard drive:
- To start with, launch Disk Utility. You can search for it using Spotlight Search or go to “Finder”>” Application”>” Utility”
- After that, you need to check on an external hard drive. Next, click on the “First Aid” tab and choose “Run” to begin running diagnostics.
If First Aid tools become successful in fixing problems, then your external hard drive should now be available for you to mount. What if the tool fails to repair issues? Then, your drive is badly broken or may be formatted through a file system that your Mac can’t read. In this way, we recommended that you should recover data from the damaged hard drive. Check out the next section to learn how to get back and how hard disk data on Mac.
Part 4. How to Recover and Show Hard Drive Data on Mac?
Have you ever wondered what if you found that you can’t access the data stored on your Mac hard drive due to sudden power failure, or virus-attack? Or if above methods fail to fix “external hard drive not mounting Mac”. In such cases, data recovery software can help you to easily get back hard drive data on your Mac.
1. Recoverit - The Best Software to Recover Mac Files:
Whenever you experience a data loss situation, Recoverit Data Recovery Mac will help you to retrieve it. This data recovery software will come in handy even when you’ve never made a backup of your device. You now know how to partition Mac hard drive and unpartition it. But knowing how you can recover the lost or deleted files from the drive is also necessary.
Mac Os See What Programs Are Using Hard Drive Time
2. How to Recover Lost Word Files on Mac:
Step 1: Select a Location
Launch the software and select the drive from where the data files are lost. If you don’t know which drive to search, tap on the “I can’t find my partition” option and hit the Start button.
Step 2: Scan the Location
Typically, the software will run an All-Around Recovery scan and search for the lost and deleted files on the entire drive.
Step 3: Preview and Recover
When the scan completes, the files will be listed on the screen. The software will sort out the files according to format to make the search easier. You can select multiple files at a time and have a preview at them.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that creating and removing a Mac drive partition is not that tough. You just have to careful during the process. And in case of a mishap, Recoverit is always here for your help so that you don’t have to suffer from data loss situation.
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Partitioning your hard drive can be a frustrating and daunting task. However, once you understand how the process works, it’s a lot less scary. So why would you want to partition a drive?
Back when I was in college, like many other students, I had a MacBook Pro for ease of use and its minimalist aesthetic. I didn’t think about the fact that some applications that I needed for school were not compatible on Mac. That is when I thought about partitioning my drive so that I could run Windows on Mac.
In addition, I had an external hard drive that I also wanted to be able to use with both OS X and Windows. In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps for partitioning internal and external hard drives on a Mac.
Before you start, you should make sure to backup your entire Mac computer using Time Machine. Even if you don’t mess anything up, the chances are good that the OS will screw up and break your system.
Partition External Drive
If you have a large external hard drive, you can easily partition it so that the entire drive gets utilized. I was using a 1.5 TB external drive with my Mac, but never really used more than 1/4 of the space.
Instead, here’s how I ended up partitioning my drive, which ended up making it much more useful:
- 33%: Mac (Extra Storage) – 500GB
- 33%: Mac (Time Machine Backup) – 500GB
- 33%: Windows (Extra Storage and Backup can go on same partition) – 500GB
As you can see, each partition can have its own file format. If you have an even larger drive, you can create even more partitions for other operating systems like Linux, etc.
To partition the drive, go to Spotlight at the top of your MacBook Screen (Notification Bar) and type in Disk Utility.
On the left hand side, navigate to the tab that says EXTERNAL.
Yours will look a little bit different than mine. Under the External heading on the left hand side, you should have one hard drive instead of 3 (I have already partitioned mine). Navigate to that external hard drive and partition it according to your needs.
NOTE: If your external hard drive is not formatted for the Mac operating system, you may first need to Initialize it and then Erase it. It’s very easy:
- Under the external tab on the left side, select the drive you want to use.
- Then select the Erase option at the top
- Once there, give it a name and format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
- For the Scheme, you can pick from GUID, MBR or Apple. If you’re only using the drive for storage, then it doesn’t really matter which one you pick. However, if you plan to boot from the drive, you should pick MBR for Windows and Linux and GUID for OS X. If you plan to use the drive for Boot Camp, you should also pick GUID.
Note that you can also click on Security Options and choose from different levels of security. By default, OS X will use the fastest method, which not does securely erase the drive. If you move the slider to Most Secure, it will meet the DOD standard for erasing data by overwriting the data 7 times. This will prevent anyone or any software from recovering any previously written data from the drive.
OS X may ask you if you want to use the drive for Time Machine backups, but you should choose Decide Later unless you want to use the entire drive for the backups. Now you’re ready to partition the external drive!
Go to the top where it has the options: First Aid, Partition, Erase, Restore, Mount, etc. Select Partition and create the partitions based on your specific needs. In my case, I chose a size of 500 GB, which is one-third of the drive.
Select how you would like to partition the drive (refer back to my percentages, as that’s what I have used in the screenshots here), select Apply and then click Partition. After this, it will take a few minutes to partition, so be patient!
When completed should see the green check mark next to your drive and it should say Operation Successful. Now select Done and you’re done with the first partition.
Now to partition the rest of the space, you will click on Untitled under External and then click on Partition again.
Give the partition a name, pick a size and choose the format. Since this is going to be for Windows storage, I chose MS-DOS (FAT). You can also choose exFAT if you like as that is compatible with both Windows and Mac.
Partition Internal Drive
Partitioning an internal hard drive is pretty much the same in terms of the procedure you have to follow, but it’s a little bit different in how it gets implemented.
Since you already have OS X installed on your internal drive, when you click Partition and choose a size, you’ll notice that you can’t create a partition that is smaller than the amount of space already used on the drive.
My internal drive was already using 359GB of space, so when I typed in 200GB, it automatically changed it to 359GB and put up a message stating that the first volume cannot be removed and the volume could not be split because the resulting volumes would be too small.
So if you want to create an additional partition, the first thing is to create a partition that will include OS X and give you some additional space for installing programs, etc. Below, I left the name as Macintosh HD and made the partition 500GB. That means the partition where OS X is installed with have about 140GB of breathing room for extra data.
Basically, we are just shrinking the original partition, which took up the entire disk to something smaller. Then we will partition the free space as we like.
As you can see, I have made the original partition 500GB instead of 1TB, which frees up 500GB on the disk for creating other partitions. As with the external hard drive, once the partition has been created, click on Untitled, but this time under the Internal heading and click on Partition.
That’s basically all there is to partitioning drives in OS X. Hopefully, it worked for you. Enjoy!