My external hard drive suddenly stopped showing up on my Mac, Finder, and Disk Utility. It contains important files I need to recover. What steps can I take to access the drive or safely restore the data without formatting it?
Start by ruling out the connection: try a different cable, port, and powered enclosure or adapter, then check System Information under USB or Thunderbolt. You can also run diskutil list in Terminal. If the drive is missing there too, recovery software cannot access it because macOS is not detecting the hardware. Avoid repeated power cycles, formatting, initializing, or opening the drive yourself, especially if it clicks, beeps, or keeps disconnecting.
If the drive appears in diskutil list but will not mount, make a sector-by-sector image or clone before attempting repairs. Running First Aid directly on a failing drive can make recovery harder. You can scan the image with Disk Drill for Mac or another recovery tool, and save recovered files to a different disk. Never recover files back onto the problem drive.
If another enclosure does not help and the drive remains absent from System Information, the likely problem is the enclosure electronics, USB bridge, power supply, or the drive itself. For irreplaceable data, that is the point to stop troubleshooting and contact a professional recovery lab rather than risk further damage.
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Do not remove the bare drive from its enclosure unless you know the enclosure is only a simple adapter. Some branded externals use the USB bridge for hardware encryption, so moving the disk to a generic dock can make the data look unreadable even when it is intact. Try the complete drive on another Mac first, and if it mounts, copy the most important files immediately instead of running repairs. Keep the original enclosure if you end up using a recovery lab.
If the drive is missing from System Information under USB/Thunderbolt, recovery software cannot access it either, so test a different cable, port, and power supply first. Only try Disk Drill after macOS detects the physical device, and recover files to a separate drive, never back onto the failing one.
Before anyone jumps to hardware failure, check that Disk Utility is actually set to show the whole disk. By default it only lists mounted volumes, so a drive with a damaged partition map can look completely absent. Open the View menu and pick Show All Devices, then look again. Same idea in Terminal, diskutil list shows physical disks even when nothing mounts. I’ve seen plenty of ‘it disappeared’ cases that were just this setting plus a corrupted partition table, not a dead drive.
The connection advice from @spriteking and @victor is solid and worth doing first, no argument there. Where I’d push back slightly is treating the cable-and-port routine as the only gate. If the disk shows in diskutil list as a raw device with no readable volume, macOS technically sees the hardware but Finder gives you nothing. That’s exactly the situation where recovery software earns its keep. Disk Drill can scan that raw device and rebuild files even when there’s no mountable filesystem, so I wouldn’t write off software just because Finder is blank.
The encryption warning from @codelinux8 is the one I’d take most seriously if this is a branded drive. Pull it out of a hardware-encrypting enclosure and you may be staring at scrambled bytes that no recovery tool can fix. So my order would be simple. Confirm whether the device is visible at all in diskutil list, keep the original enclosure, and only reach for a scan once you know macOS can see the raw disk. If it never appears there and the drive is silent or clicking, stop and price out a lab before you make it worse.