Are your removable hard drives no longer visible to your Mac?
Fear not. I have an answer.
But first, the day started like any other. I had too many projects for too little time and a nice ball of stress bundled up in my belly as I raced to work through each one based on who might yell the loudest for their deadline. And that’s when it hit me, JUST THE TIME when I can least afford it — my computer was getting slower and slower until the “gay ball of death” had taken over my life.
I cried, “UNCLE!” and closed everything up and restarted. You know, the last resort of the truly deparate? Only instead of making my troubles better, they only got worse by 10x. Both of my removable hard drives had failed to mount… and a mysterious pop up appeared on the starboard side of my screen alerting me that “MacCleaner” was there to the rescue me. I’ve seen this POS before — a phony fix for Macs that installs malware only to get you to buy their “remedy” which simply means they have you for life. Of course, I don’t bite and get straight to work within disc utility, finder mounting settings and my applications folder to look for any crap that shouldn’t be there.
I remove all that I can find.
I restart again, and one of the drives mounts! Alas, it is now READ ONLY and no longer formatted for Mac OS. Funny, I could swear I didn’t touch anything. I have a Mac Laptop, I try each drive in it. They mount! However, they are now both READ ONLY and unusable. With over 3 TB of stored files for each one of my clients within them, it’s safe to say that I didn’t really want to take the first Internet advice, which was to “simply reformat the drives to work with both Macs and PCs.”
Reformatting = Erasing. Not happening.
The Solution:
Finally, I seek out the source, Seagate, the maker of my storage drives. Buried in their support network is a little program that you can download for free that, once installed, performs it’s magic and your drives — and your work life — are made whole again.
Paragon Driver for macOS
You can find what I used here. You plug in your devices, then get the download, then run the program and then re-start your computer. With any luck, you’ll be back in business. From start to finish, I spent two hours filled with dread and just a touch of panic. Had I done this last bit, 10 minutes — no sweat — inner peace.
Here’s hoping this helped you get your Mac life back.
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