Mac – After installing High Sierra can’t mount external USB drive (TimeMachine), why not

external-diskhigh sierratime-machineusb

I installed High Sierra and now my iMac (27" 2011) can not see the external USB TimeMachine drive.

The drive shows up in DiskUtil but it's greyed out. I can not mount it. In fact it doesn't respond to any commands, mount, eject, first aid won't run.

I also have a MacBook Pro (High Sierra too), it can't read the drive, same problem.

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I tried booting into Recovery mode, I still can't access the drive.

The drive is fine, I can plug it into a Linux machine and I can browse the disc.

How can I fix this?

Thanks
Rich

Best Answer

Ok something is broken in High Sierra disk utils (as of 2018/04/02). It seems unable to mount discs correctly. And I think crashes. I suspect it's something to do with the EFI partition but I'm only guessing.

To fix my problem I had to format the drive and start the backup from scratch. This did fix the problem.

However you can not format the disc from disk tools, it crashes. You have to format it via the terminal.

I followed this short guide.

https://mycyberuniverse.com/web/how-fix-mediakit-reports-not-enough-space-on-device.html

I then ran Time Machine and selected the new disc.

Not quite sure how a bug like this manages to fly under the radar at Apple. Poor show.

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