My external hard drive suddenly stopped showing up on my Mac, including in Finder. It contains important files I need to recover, and I’m looking for safe troubleshooting steps that won’t erase or overwrite the data.
If the drive appears in Disk Utility but not Finder, don’t initialize, erase, or run First Aid yet, since repairs can modify a damaged file system. Try another cable, port, and Mac first, then enable “External disks” in Finder settings. If it stays readable in Disk Utility, scan it with Disk Drill for Mac, but recover files to a different drive. If it clicks, disconnects repeatedly, or never appears in Disk Utility or System Information, stop powering it on and consider professional recovery.
The missing detail is whether macOS sees the physical drive at the correct capacity, even if the volume itself is missing. If Disk Utility shows a 2 TB device as 2 TB but no mountable partition underneath it, that points more toward partition or file-system damage. If it reports the wrong capacity, appears only intermittently, or shows only the enclosure controller, the USB bridge or power supply may be the actual problem.
I agree with @swiftwizard1425 about avoiding First Aid at this stage, but I would go further: don’t keep rescanning a questionable drive. If it stays connected and reads without strange noises, make a sector-by-sector image onto another drive of equal or greater size, then run Disk Drill or another recovery tool against the image rather than the original. That gives you a fallback if the hardware gets worse halfway through recovery.
A failed enclosure is sometimes cheaper to solve than failed storage, especially with desktop drives that use separate power adapters. Trying another compatible powered enclosure or dock can help, but only if it’s a standard removable SATA drive. Some portable models have USB hardware or encryption built into the drive board, so opening the case can make recovery harder.
Check System Information under USB or Thunderbolt before doing anything else. If the drive appears there but not in Disk Utility, recovery software such as Disk Drill may still detect it, but save recovered files to a different drive, never back onto the problem disk.
Set your expectations before you touch anything. Recovery from a drive that vanished isn’t a guaranteed thing, and how you treat the first hour matters more than which tool you land on. If the files are worth real money to you, treat the drive as already half dead and act accordingly.
The imaging advice from @kernelnode5670 is the strongest thing in this thread and I’d bump it up the priority list. A lot of people burn through their good luck by scanning and rescanning a wobbly drive until it gives up mid-recovery. If it mounts long enough to read, get a block-level image onto a spare drive first, then do all your poking at the copy. That way a bad connection or a dying head doesn’t cost you the one clean read you had.
Where I’d be more cautious is the enclosure swapping. It’s genuinely worth it for a bare desktop 3.5 drive with its own power brick, since a dead adapter or bridge board fakes a dead drive all the time. But for a slim portable drive, cracking the case is a gamble. Plenty of them put the USB controller and hardware encryption right on the drive PCB, so pulling the bare drive out can leave you with data you literally can’t decrypt anymore. If it’s one of those, leave it sealed.
One boring thing people skip: power. Front-panel ports, unpowered hubs, and long cheap cables can starve a bus-powered drive just enough that it spins up, drops, and never mounts cleanly. Straight into a rear port or a powered hub before you assume file-system damage.
On the tool itself, Disk Drill is fine for the read-only scan pass everyone’s pointing to, but I’d treat it as the thing you run against your image, not the fix. If the drive starts clicking, or it only shows up as the enclosure controller and never the actual disk, no software is going to save it and you’re into paid recovery territory. At that point the honest question is whether the files are worth a three-figure bill or more, because that’s the real fork in the road here.