I have a new macbook pro. One of the external drives (HDD, relatively new, < year old) is not mounting. I plug it in and the light on the drive only flashes. It does not show up at all in the disk utility, so I can't do anything with it. Thoughts or suggestions? (It worked fine on my macbook air--which i traded in and do not have any longer).
**I just tested this on my windows 11 machine and it mounted fine.
MacBook Pro (M5, 2025)
TechMuse88 wrote:
I had it formated it in exFAT so I could store my photos from both windows and mac sources. It worked fine on my macbook air.
On the M-series Mac laptops, you need to approve all connected devices before they will be seen by macOS. See the instructions in the following Apple article:
Allow USB and other accessories to connect to your Mac - Apple Support
Sometimes the pop-up notifications do not appear, or may quickly disappear or become hidden behind other windows. I have chosen to change the "Allow Accessories to connect" default setting to "Always when unlocked". This doesn't really reduce security because people would just click allow on the pop-up anyway, but this setting prevents you from missing those pop-up notifications. The "Never" setting is a security issue so avoid it because you don't want anyone connecting devices to your locked Mac, but all other options just seem to cause problems from time to time.
TechMuse88 wrote:
I had it formated it in exFAT so I could store my photos from both windows and mac sources. It worked fine on my macbook air.
On the M-series Mac laptops, you need to approve all connected devices before they will be seen by macOS. See the instructions in the following Apple article:
Allow USB and other accessories to connect to your Mac - Apple Support
Sometimes the pop-up notifications do not appear, or may quickly disappear or become hidden behind other windows. I have chosen to change the "Allow Accessories to connect" default setting to "Always when unlocked". This doesn't really reduce security because people would just click allow on the pop-up anyway, but this setting prevents you from missing those pop-up notifications. The "Never" setting is a security issue so avoid it because you don't want anyone connecting devices to your locked Mac, but all other options just seem to cause problems from time to time.
Is it possible that the new drive is formatted in a Windows-only format such as NTFS?
Macs cannot read that format natively and will need an enabling utility such as MS NTFS by Paragon.
Did you have such a utility installed on your old Mac?
Can you check the format of the drive with your Windows computer?
I had it formated it in exFAT so I could store my photos from both windows and mac sources. It worked fine on my macbook air.
External HD not mounting on new macbook pro.
