External Drive Showing Up Weird

[mshcherb]

Hey guys -

So, ever since I updated to High Sierra, my external hard drive (MyPassport, formatted Mac OS Extended Journaled) doesn't show up in Finder but appears in Disk Utility just fine. Yes, I have external drives ticked in Finder's Preferences.

After some investigation, I right clicked on the volume and asked for it to Show in Finder. Now, it opened the drive, but for some reason, it shows up as a read-only "Dropbox Installer" volume? The heck? Does anyone have a solution for this? I tried relaunching Finder multiple times and fixing the disk but it did nothing. Thanks!

 

[casperes1996]

Try unmounting it, and mounting it via Terminal

diskutil mount /dev/disk2s2

Print out any error messages it may show.

PS. disk2s2 assumes that's still the disk identifier at the time the command is run - this may change if you pull out the drive and plug it back in or reboot

 

[techwarrior]

I have had issues with external drives on a few occasions, and find that rebooting with the drive unplugged, then plugging it back in often fixes it.

If that doesn't do it, eject from disk utility, unplug the drive, reboot but hold CMD+OPT+P+R as soon as you hear the chime, keep holding till the Mac reboots again. Repeat this 2-3 times, then let it boot normal. Once it is up and running, plug the drive back in.

PRAM caches info about connected hardware. Resetting PRAM flushes the system cache and forces the OS to re-discover devices. Perfectly safe, and a common troubleshooting step.

 

[dianeoforegon]

It could be a bad preference file. Try booting into a test User to see if you can see the drive. Remember to set Finder preference to show external drive under Sidebar.

CREATE A NEW USER

Go to System Preferences --> Create a New User in Users & Groups.
Switch to the New User by logging out/in or use Fast User Switching.
You can skip logging in with an Apple ID unless you need to test iCloud apps. Hit continue then skip.

If the problem goes away, determine which preference file was changed by going to the User's Library > Preferences in List view and sort on date modified. If it's not clear, make a few more changes to the Finder Preferences to make it's plist pop to the top of the list.

Boot back into your User and delete the bad preference file. Restart your Mac. Log in and reset preferences. Does it show correctly now?

 

[Fishrrman]

If the drive won't show up properly in the sidebar, don't lose sleep over it.

Just "access it from the desktop".
Or -- in a Finder dialog box -- pick "computer" at the top and then "work your way down" until you get to the drive.