External HDDs do not appear on Desktop

[unblocktheplane]

I have a box of old external boxes holding 500GB - 3TB 3.5" HDDs. Interfaces are FireWire 800 / USB-B / eSATA.

Tried adapters for all these:
FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt
USB-B to USB-A
eSATA to USB-A
No dice.

Tried connecting to my 2015 MBP (10.13.6) & MacMini (10.12). HDDs are spinning fine. Two of the disks have digital displays which show booting & then OK status.

Not only would I like to recover whatever data may be on them, I'd like to reformat a couple & use them for extra backups.

Any ideas??? TIA!

 

[justashooter]

First, is finder set to display drives on the desktop?

Quick Tip: How to Put a Missing Drive Icon Back on Your Mac Desktop

The other day I noticed that one of the external drive icons on my Mac Desktop had vanished. Thankfully, it’s easy to remedy this, as well as make sure

eshop.macsales.com

If it is I would open disk utility and see if they appear. Check how they are formatted. MAC OS X should read the various mac formats as well as windows fat16, fat32. exFAT, NTFS

If either of these don't fix your problem you can try removing them from their old enclosures and see whether they are ide or sata drives. if they are all sata drives I would get one of these sata docks:

SABRENT USB 3.0 to SATA I/II/III Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5 or 3.5in HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function [20+TB Support] (EC-HD2B)

Supports Standard Desktop 2.5"/3.5" SATA Hard Drives or SSD Supports hard drives up to 10TB Plug and play, no drivers needed Supports Offline Cloning up to 60Mbps Supports Transfer Speeds up to 5Gbps (USB 3.0),480Mbps (USB 2.0), 12Mbps (USB 1.1)_Product description:_The Sabrent SATA Hard Drive Do...

www.amazon.com

If they are sata and ide I would get one of these, which will connect ide, 2.5 inch ide and sata drives:

Unitek USB 3.0 to IDE and SATA Converter External Hard Drive Adapter Kit for Universal 2.5/3.5 HDD/SSD Hard Drive Disk, One Touch Backup Function, Included 12V/2A Power Adapter

Unitek USB 3.0 to IDE and SATA Converter External Hard Drive Adapter Kit for Universal 2.5/3.5 HDD/SSD Hard Drive Disk, One Touch Backup Function, Included 12V/2A Power Adapter

www.amazon.com

 

[pmiles]

Do you have access to a Windows machine? Sometimes mounting said devices to a Windows machine first then trying to mount them to a Mac computer does the trick. This of course applied mainly to trying to mount to hardware that it previously had mounted to in the past.

I know you are curious about what might be on said drives... but odds are good, if you haven't bothered to boot them in a very long time, nothing is on them worth retrieving. And on that note... older hardware and/or drives are probably not the best option for storage/backups going forward... as demonstrated by this current hiccup.

 

[Fishrrman]

These "external boxes" that you speak about...
Can you open them up and take the drives OUT OF them?

That's an important question, please answer.

Because... if you CAN... then the best solution is to do what justashooter recommends in reply 2 above:
... Get a USB3/SATA docking station (either single bay or dual bay), and use that to mount the drives on the desktop (assuming they will mount).

USB3/SATA docks are cheap and plentiful.
I've used them for many years, they work great.