Hard drive not recognized

[ladybug]

Hi! So I have two external hard drives that I have been using with my Mac no problem. At some point they just stopped connecting. They do not appear anymore. And the drive itself works, it makes noises and the LEDs show activity and then when it doesn't appear in the system it thinks it's idle so it goes to sleep. Both of them do that. I am using Paragon NTFS for Mac add on to write to them but macOS normally recognizes them even without the add-on(just read-only). I connected them to a Ubuntu VM, they work just fine everything is there. So I don't get it. I need to fix this ASAP, I need those drives. Any suggestions?

[QwertyChouskie]

Try plugging into a Windows machine and running chkdsk.  Might be a corruption bit set that's causing macOS to not want to mount the drive.

[SpookyCitrus]

MacOS can be pretty finicky with this kind of setup even using Paragon. I'd run a check disk in a Windows environment on the drives if you don't have a standalone Windows computer you can use a portable OS like WinPE. If that doesn't work and the drives are still not showing up on the Mac and if they are just file storage drives I'd recommend moving the data off of them, formatting them to Exfat instead of NTFS and moving the data back. 

[ladybug]

43 minutes ago, QwertyChouskie said:

Try plugging into a Windows machine and running chkdsk.  Might be a corruption bit set that's causing macOS to not want to mount the drive.

 

7 minutes ago, SpookyCitrus said:

MacOS can be pretty finicky with this kind of setup even using Paragon. I'd run a check disk in a Windows environment on the drives if you don't have a standalone Windows computer you can use a portable OS like WinPE. If that doesn't work and the drives are still not showing up on the Mac and if they are just file storage drives I'd recommend moving the data off of them, formatting them to Exfat instead of NTFS and moving the data back. 

ok thanks I will connect them and run that! I could just run a vm in Parallels with a full version of Windows I will need that anyway, but just out if curiosity can you put Windows PE on a USB to have a Windows installation ready to go if you need Windows for something quick that doesn't require a full installation? That would be pretty awesome.

[SpookyCitrus]

4 minutes ago, stefanmz said:

ok thanks I will connect them and run that! I could just run a vm in Parallels with a full version of Windows I will need that anyway, but just out if curiosity can you put Windows PE on a USB to have a Windows installation ready to go if you need Windows for something quick that doesn't require a full installation? That would be pretty awesome.

Yep, WinPE stands for Windows Portable Environment. You just put it onto a USB flash drive and can boot into it at anytime. It will only run on Intel based Macs, as like Windows it's not compatible with the Mac ARM based processors so if you have an M1 or newer Mac it won't work. 

[ladybug]

17 hours ago, SpookyCitrus said:

Yep, WinPE stands for Windows Portable Environment. You just put it onto a USB flash drive and can boot into it at anytime. It will only run on Intel based Macs, as like Windows it's not compatible with the Mac ARM based processors so if you have an M1 or newer Mac it won't work. 

oh ok it's an M1 one yes. So I will just use a vm with parallels then

[ladybug]

Hey so I haven't run chkdisk but I updated Paragon NTFS and they work now, there was an update for macOS Sonoma that enables compatibility