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You can use a specialized data recovery tool to recover your files from an external hard drive on your Mac, even if it doesn’t mount.
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How to Get Data from a Drive That Is Not Mounted To find out more about how to check these settings and enable them, see Option #5. ⚙️ Wrong settings: It’s quite possible that you can’t see your external HDD in Finder or Desktop because you’ve disabled this setting.With all newer macOS versions (Catalina, Monterey, and Big Sur), you can read and write external HDD with practically any file system. For example, if your Mac is running macOS High Sierra, then it won’t be able to open external HDDs using the APFS file system. 💻 Older macOS version: Not all macOS versions support certain file systems used by external hard drives.🦠 Drive corruption: If your external hard drive is corrupted either because of a virus attack or the interruption of the read-and-write process, it’s quite possible that it might be causing the mounting problem.❌ Damaged USB port: If you think that the USB port in your Mac might be damaged, try to connect a different external device (HDD, flash drive, etc.) to your computer to see if it mounts correctly.
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To know if the latter is true in your case, simply try to use a different cable. It’s possible that the USB cable that you’re using to mount the drive is either loose in the port and you need to adjust it slightly, or it is damaged.
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