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I was backing up (Time Machine) my older MacBook Air to a 5TB external hard drive when it was inadvertantly disconnected from power. The MacBook Air is fine, but the backup drive was corrupted and will not mount via Disk Utility or Terminal. I'm not concerned about the lost backups but I would like to erase/reformat the drive. Everything I have tried will not get it to mount. Is it toast?
MacBook Air 11″, macOS 12.6
gshigenaka wrote:
I was backing up (Time Machine) my older MacBook Air to a 5TB external hard drive when it was inadvertantly disconnected from power. The MacBook Air is fine, but the backup drive was corrupted and will not mount via Disk Utility or Terminal. I'm not concerned about the lost backups but I would like to erase/reformat the drive. Everything I have tried will not get it to mount. Is it toast?
You can try Disk Utility>View>Show All Devices I would erase/reformat/initialize as new
Verify you are seeing the Parent drive not Volumes below
There maybe a force mount hold the Option key File>Mount
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support (CA)
gshigenaka wrote:
I was backing up (Time Machine) my older MacBook Air to a 5TB external hard drive when it was inadvertantly disconnected from power. The MacBook Air is fine, but the backup drive was corrupted and will not mount via Disk Utility or Terminal. I'm not concerned about the lost backups but I would like to erase/reformat the drive. Everything I have tried will not get it to mount. Is it toast?
You can try Disk Utility>View>Show All Devices I would erase/reformat/initialize as new
Verify you are seeing the Parent drive not Volumes below
There maybe a force mount hold the Option key File>Mount
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support (CA)
Thanks, I finally did get the drive to show up in Disk Utility, but the reformat attempt failed. Sigh.
Power outage during Time Machine backup corrupted external hard drive
