Summary: In this article, we will provide you 7 useful solutions to the issue of Toshiba external hard drives not showing up on Mac. Besides, we will also tell you how to recover lost data from the Toshiba external hard drive with free Mac data recovery software - iBoysoft Data Recovery Software for Mac.
- Toshiba External Hard Drive Support
- Toshiba External Hard Drive Software Download
- Toshiba External Hard Drive Installation
- Toshiba External Hard Drive Cord
- Toshiba External Hard Drive Drivers
'Toshiba external hard drive not showing up on Mac' is a frequently discussed question in Apple support community. Here's an example.
I have a Toshiba Canvio 1TB USB 3.0 hard drive. But when I plugged it into my Macbook Pro (mid 2012) it didn't show up. I have tried to swap around the USB connection cords but still not showing up. Reading something that the Toshiba hard drive won't show up on Mac laptops due to lack of power, I tried using an external powered USB hub still nothing. Can anyone tell me why my external hard drive is not showing up on the Mac, and how to fix it?
Why is your Toshiba external hard drive not show up on Mac?
It turns out that most of the time, Mac doesn't recognize external hard drives, USB flash drives, pen drives, SD cards, etc. Just because the drive is not properly connected. Since a good connection is a basic condition for secondary hard drives working on the Mac, we need to try these things step by step.
EMEA Region Toshiba Storage Solutions. Here you can download technical Datasheets, product manuals, images, certain software and further product related documents. Check Your USB Cable Is Firm Into Your Mac. You may think that’s a silly one to start off with.
In fact, there are various reasons that Mac doesn't recognize an external hard drive. Toshiba external hard drive not showing up could result from file catalog corruption, operating system errors, virus, physical damages, etc. Besides Toshiba portable hard drive, this error can also occur to WD external hard drives, Seagate external hard drives, etc.
Whatever the reason is, it will prevent you from accessing the files stored on it.
How to fix Toshiba external hard drive not showing up on Mac error?
Compared to Toshiba Canvio for Desktop drive, Toshiba portable hard drives offer more possibility. The Canvio range of Toshiba external hard drive includes Slim, Alu, Advance, Premium, Basics, and Ready. Although with unique features, the Toshiba portable hard drive still won't work sometimes.
You can try these solutions when Toshiba disc drive is not showing up on Mac.
Solution 1: Do some basic checks
If your Toshiba external hard drive doesn't show up when connected to a Mac via USB port, follow the troubleshooting ideas below.
1. Toshiba external hard drive is not correctly powered.
Fix: Try to connect it to an externally powered USB hub, or try to insert the Type-C Multi-Port Adapter into another USB port on your Mac.
2. The USB cable is damaged.
Fix: Try a different USB cable but make sure it is compatible with your Toshiba external hard drive.
3. The USB port is damaged.
Fix: Try a different port on your Mac, a different computer, or even a PC to connect this Toshiba hard drive.
3. Toshiba 3.0 external hard drive is not showing up.
Fix: Please update the USB 3.0 driver of your Toshiba hard drive to the latest version on Mac.
Most of the time, you can see the Toshiba external hard drive showing up on Mac again after these checks. If not, let's move forward.
Solution 2: Show the Toshiba external hard drive on the desktop
Usually, a correctly connected external hard drive will show up on the desktop, in Finder and Disk Utility. If you can't see it, just check the settings of your Mac.
Step 1: Click Finder on menu bar.
Step 2: Go to Preferences > General tab.
Step 3: Make sure the 'External disks' option is ticked. If not, tick the box before it.
This operation will show the Toshiba external hard drive on the Mac desktop.
Solution 3: Show the Toshiba external hard drive in Finder
Step 1: Go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar tab > Locations.
Step 2: Make sure the 'External disks' option is ticked.
Solution 4: Mount the Toshiba external hard drive in Disk Utility
Sometimes, the connected external hard drive shows up but it won't work on Mac. In this case, you can check if it is recognized and mounted in Disk Utility. If the Toshiba external hard drive is not mounted in Disk Utility, you can mount the drive manually.
Specifically, you can click on the Mount button on the top of the window, or hit the Mount icon beside the drive.
Solution 5: Fix the Toshiba external hard drive in Disk Utility
However, if the Toshiba external hard drive won't mount in Disk Utility, the file system of the drive may be corrupted. You need to fix it with First Aid.
Step 1: Go to Utilities > Disk Utility.
Step 2: Select the unmounted Toshiba external hard drive and click First Aid on the top of the window.
Step 3: Wait till the verification and reparation process ends.
Solution 6: Reformat the Toshiba external hard drive
IfFirst Aid failed on external hard drive, the drive must be severely damaged, logically or physically. In this case, you can firstly try to fix the drive by reformatting, which is able to fix logical errors like file system corruption, partition table corruption, etc.
Note: Reformatting a drive will erase all the files stored on it. To prevent unwanted data loss, it's necessary to recover lost data from the not showing up Toshiba drive in advance.
iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is trustworthy and professional Mac data recovery software that is able torecover deleted photos, videos, documents, music files fromunreadable USB flash drives,unmountable SD cards, memory cards, external hard drives, and corrupted, damaged, formatted, inaccessible drives on macOS Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra/Sierra and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7. It supports HFS+, HFS, FAT32, exFAT andAPFS external drive data recovery.
Tutorial to recover data from the Toshiba external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
Step 1: Download, install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
Step 2: Select the not showing up Toshiba external hard drive and click 'Scan' button. This program will start scanning for lost data.
Step 3: Preview the searching results, choose files you need, and click 'Recover' to get them back.
After recovering data from the Toshiba external hard drive, you can reset the Toshiba external hard drive by reformatting the hard disk in Disk Utility now.
Step 1: Select the Toshiba external hard drive in Disk Utility sidebar.
Step 2: Click Erase on the top of the window.
Step 3: Follow the instructions to finish the reformatting process. Specifically, you need to provide a Name and a Format according to your preference.
After the process finishes, you will hopefully see the Toshiba external hard drive showing up on Mac correctly.
Solution 7: Send the drive to a disk reparation center
If you have tried out all the solutions above with no luck, the Toshiba external hard drive could be damaged physically. In case your Toshiba HDD is not recognized by your PC anymore and the blue LED is OFF and the red LED is ON, the HDD needs to be replaced. You have to send it to specialists or replace it with a new one.
How to make Toshiba external hard drives work on Mac?
Almost all Toshiba Canvio external hard drives are preformatted with NTFS file system, which means you can't use it directly on Mac. You can't write to NTFS in macOS by default. If you try to save files, the new Toshiba external hard drive is not working but read-only on Mac.
To use Toshiba external hard drive on Windows and Mac without formatting, you need to download an NTFS for Mac software. You can also format this external hard drive with HFS+ for Mac usage only. But on Mac, you can't enjoy features provided by Toshiba software like regular automatic backups of data with Toshiba Storage Backup Software and password lock feature with Toshiba Storage Security Software.
Toshiba External Hard Drive Support
Conclusion:
Toshiba external hard drive is widely used in our daily lives to store tons of different files. Once it can't be shown up on your Mac, there're solutions for you to recover lost data with free Mac data recovery software, like iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac, as well as to fix the error through simple steps.
A bonus tip: To keep the security of your data, you should back them up regularly via Time Machine or on another external drive.
• How to backup Mac with Time Machine?
'I have a Toshiba external HDD and today my computer didn’t recognize it after connected it, I don’t want to lose my data and my 2TB Toshiba, can I do something to repair it, please help.' Toshiba external hard drive is popular around the world, partly because it is more reliable and affordable. But it does not mean that Toshiba won’t go wrong. According to our research, software issues usually are responsible for Toshiba external hard drive not showing up or not responsive. And in this tutorial, you can learn multiple ways to repair external hard drive without data loss.
If you are an experienced Windows user and have used several versions of Windows on your computer, you may hear of the Windows.old folder. Considering that many people are not familiar with it, we are going to share the basic knowledge about it and how to restore Windows old in this post.
Recommend: Data Recovery
You may need professional Toshiba external hard drive software to recover data on it, if the external hard drive not showing up. From this point, we recommend Apeaksoft Data Recovery. Its key features include:
- Easy to use and recover data from external hard drive in one click.
- Data recovery in various situations.
- Work on a variety of data types and formats, including all image, video, audio, document, email formats and more.
- Retrieve files from external hard drive to computer in original format and quality.
- Preview all readable data on external hard drive for selectively recovery.
- Quicker, safer and lightweight.
- Moreover, Data Recovery is available to Windows 10/8.1/8/Vista/XP and a wide arrange of file systems, like NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, EXT, etc.
In short, it is the best way to recover data from Toshiba external hard drive when it not working.
How to recover data from inaccessible Toshiba external hard drive
Step 1: Scan entire Toshiba to look for data
Connect your Toshiba to your computer and install the best Toshiba software on the computer. Launch Data Recovery, go to the Data Type area and select the data types to recover. Then navigate to Location part and choose the Toshiba External Hard Drive under Removal Drives. Hit the Scan button to let Data Recovery work.
Step 2: Preview before Toshiba External Hard Drive recovery
When the result window shows up, you can preview the readable data separated by types and formats. For instance, go to the Image tab from left side and look at recoverable pictures. The Filter function at top ribbon is able to find certain files quickly. Plus, the Deep Scan function could scan your hard drive deeply and get back more data.
Step 3: Recover data from External Hard Drive in one click
Toshiba External Hard Drive Software Download
Select all files that you want to recover and click on the Recover button. Make sure to choose a different hard drive on the popup dialog and begin data recovery.
Toshiba external hard drive not showing up, how to fix
After recovered data, you can feel free to fix your Toshiba external hard drive not showing up with the 100% working methods below.
Method 1: Check USB Root Hub
It is well-known that Toshiba external hard drive relies on USB connection to communicate with computer. It is also the power source of the hard drive. If it is turned off, Toshiba external hard drive not recognized by your computer. So, follow the steps to check and correct it.
Step 1: Hold Win + R to start Run dialog, enter devmgmt.msc and click Ok to start the Device Manager window.
Step 2: Find and expand Universal Serial Bus controllers entity, right-click on the USB Root Hub sub-entity and choose Properties.
Step 3: Make sure to uncheck the box next to Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power. Confirm it and try your Toshiba again.
You will like reading: Recover Data from Damaged Hard Drive.
Method 2: Try Toshiba external hard drive in Safe Mode
Some people reported that their Toshiba hard drive not showing up on one computer but works fine on other machines. We install various third party programs on computer to enjoy advanced features, such as antivirus software. They may prevent your Toshiba from showing up. Luckily, Safe Mode could fix this problem simply.
Step 1: Remove Toshiba external hard drive from your computer. And reboot the computer into Safe Mode.
On Windows 10/8, select Power on login screen, hold Shift key and hit Restart. When Startup Settings screen shows up, head to Troubleshoot-> Advanced options-> Startup Settings, select Restart and then hold F4 key to boot into Safe Mode.
On Windows 7, keep pressing F8 key after restart your computer. Then select Safe Mode on the Advanced Boot Options screen.
Step 2: Wait for computer to start up and connect Toshiba external hard drive to your computer again. It should show up as usual.
Toshiba External Hard Drive Installation
Method 3: Reinstall Toshiba external hard drive driver
Outdated Toshiba driver may generate various problems, like Toshiba external hard drive not recognized. Reinstalling drivers is the easiest solution.
Step 1: Go to the Start menu, search for Device Manager and open it.
Step 2: Unfold the Disk drives entity on left hand side. Right-click on the Toshiba external hard drive driver, and click Uninstall.
Step 3: Restart our computer, and Windows will search and install the latest version of drivers automatically.
You may also want to know: How to backup iPhone to external hard drive
Method 4: Format Toshiba external hard drive to fix it
Formatting Toshiba external hard drive is the last but not least solution to fix the drive not showing up.
Step 1: Hold Win + R to activate Run dialog, enter diskmgmt.msc and hit OK to open the Disk Management window.
Step 2: Right-click on the Toshiba external hard drive and choose Format.
Step 3: Drop a new name in Volume label box, select NTFS or other proper file system from the dropdown menu, check the box next to Perform a quick format and click OK to start formatting the drive.
Then your external hard drive should be recognized by your computer normally.
Don’t miss: Hard Drive Recovery.
FAQs of Toshiba External Hard Drive Not Showing up
Why is my external hard drive not showing up?
It has several possible reasons: using the wrong file system, dead USB ports, partition problems on the external drive, etc.
Does Toshiba offer Data Recovery Services?
Toshiba does not provide data recovery services. But you can use a third-party data recovery tool like Apeaksoft Data Recovery to recover your data on Toshiba.
Toshiba External Hard Drive Cord
How can I recover lost data on Toshiba’s hard drive?
To learn how to recover lost data on Toshiba hard drive, you can check out this post: Guide of Toshiba Hard Drive Recovery in Various Situations
Toshiba External Hard Drive Drivers
Conclusion
Based on the tutorial above, you might understand how to repair Toshiba external hard drive not showing up and other problems. We suggest you to recover data from your external hard drive with Apeaksoft Data Recovery. Then you can follow our guides to fix Toshiba external hard drive step by step. We wish that our guides and suggestions are useful to you.