It was easy to mount the original iPod and access it liks a USB drive. It's possible to do that with an iPhone, too, although there are different approaches depending on the type of data you want to work with.
Device to Mac Mac to Device Both directions; Android Device Android OS 5.x-10.x, Phone or Tablet: iOS Device iOS 5.x-13.x, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch: Dropbox Mount feature is available through CloudMounter: Google Account Mount feature is available through CloudMounter: MTP Device Any device with MTP mode: Outlook account Mount feature is. Click ‘Add New’ link in the left panel and choose Android device; connect your Android to your Mac. Once Android device is connected, you can find “Mount disk” option in “Summary” tab. Enable it and your device will be mounted to your Mac as additional Mac disk. Now you can browse, edit and manage Android files directly on your Mac.
In this article we'll explore the different approaches, and they're summarised below:
Mac studio fix powder plus foundation c4. Fundamentally, on a non-jailbroken device it's not possible to work with data other than camera files and data from selected apps. In this article we look at both approaches.
Normally when you plug in an external hard drive to your Mac's USB port you will see it appear on the desktop (aka mount on the desktop). You can also see it in the Finder in the left column under. Prevent a partition from mounting in OS X. If you have a specific volume on your Mac that you would like to keep from being edited when attached, here's how to protect it.
PTP: Accessing Photos, videos and camera data as a disk mount
iOS automatically presents modern devices as cameras when they're connected over USB. This uses Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) which is a fairly limited system allowing you to copy photos back and forth. You'll probably recognise the
DCIM
folders that photos tend to appear in.PTP has a number of drawbacks: most obviously, you can't access files other than from the camera. And PTP doesn't support functionality such as renaming or modify files or folders: instead, it must delete and recreate them to effect a change. This is slow.
Accessing photos & app data over AFC with iTunes
Apple's knowledge-base has an article describing how to manage rudimentary filesharing with iTunes.
Accessing app data over USB with FUSE
FUSE is a system that lets users mount drives on their Windows or Mac computers without needing to make administrator-level changes to their systems. FUSE stands for 'filesystem in userspace' and is available in different forms on most platforms. FUSE itself is an abstraction layer, in that it isn't the technology that communicates directly with the device or data source: usually, another approach is used for that. In the case of mounting an iPhone as a drive, FUSE would communicate with the iPhone using another protocol: SSH, AFC/AFC2, PTP or WebDAV. On Windows, the popular Dokan user-mode file system is often used, and on macOS osxfuse is popular.
From a user's perspective, because FUSE normalises the way the device's data is presented, it usually doesn't matter which underlying protocol is responsible for the mount.
Using a FUSE mount on macOS
Let's demonstrate that approach on macOS, and how to mount a device. In order for this to work, you'll need to install the free Homebrew package manager and be familiar with using the macOS Terminal.
First of all, let's find your device's
UDID
. You can do this with the free version of iPhone Backup Extractor, with the lsusb
command, or with ioreg -p IOUSB -l -w 0
. Run iPhone Backup Extractor whilst your device is connected, select your device, and choose the 'Info' tab. You'll see the UDID
shown in the 'Hardware identifiers' section:Next, let's get FUSE for macOS ready:
And let's install
ifuse
, which is the code that can communicate with iOS devices through FUSE:With
ifuse
installed, it's possible to mount your iPhone or iPad using the UDID
we obtained earlier:That'll mount your iPhone as a disk on your machine. If you'd like to go further and dig into more data, this superuser post is rather handy, and similarly, this post covers off use of the usbmuxd tool.
Troubleshooting errors you might run into
ifuse
might complain: Invalid device UDID specified, length needs to be 40 characters
. Starting with the iPhone X, Apple changed UDID
s to use 24 bytes and a dash (-
) instead of the old 40-byte format.If you get
Failed to connect to lockdownd service on the device. Try again. If it still fails try rebooting your device.
ensure that your device is connected, and isn't displaying a 'Trust this computer' dialog. You'll need to approve that first. If you then get ERROR: Device 000000000000000000000000 returned unhandled error code -13
you'll need to disconnect and reconnect the device.Whilst doing this, it pays to ensure no other applications are running on your PC or Mac which might be trying to connect to your iOS device.
If you're only ever going to mount a single iOS device, you can just run
ifuse ~/iphone
.Need to use a pre-release version of usbmuxd?
usbmuxd
isn't frequently updated, so occasionally when a new version of iOS is released, it lacks support. To fix that, you can install the latest development version of it as below:Accessing app data over USB with FUSE on a jailbroken device
The instructions are exactly the same as above. With the device jailbroken, you'll see more data straight away. Neat, eh?
Using Filza's WebDAV server for iOS root file access
On a jailbroken iOS device, it's possible to install a file manager app named Filza through Cydia. Under Fileza's settings, you can enable WebDAV server mode. This provides a fairly simple interface for other devices to access your iOS device, although it is extremely insecure. WebDAV is a very general mechanism for working with web data, and there are many clients which can access it: including a web interface that's built-in to Filza. Connect to your device with a web browser, and you'll see the interface. Easy.
Using AFC2 to access iOS files over USB
What is AFC2?
AFC stands for 'Apple File Conduit', Apple's own mechanism for transferring data from an iOS device to a host computer. AFC runs on every iOS device, but is locked down to only providing access to a limited set of data. 'AFC2' is the nickname given to a series of tools built by the jailbreaking community, emulating AFC but providing access to the entire device. The latest implementation of AFC2 was built by Cannathea and is available on GitHub.
AFC2 can be install from Cydia, and once installed will allow an AFC client to browse the device in its entirety.
Other techniques for accessing all data on jailbroken devices
Prior to the release of iOS 8, there were several Cydia plugin for jailbroken devices which would make an iPhone present itself as a USB stick when connected. Alas, there are no longer supported on modern versions of iOS.
Recovering deleted files from a mounted iOS device
If you can mount your iPhone or iPad as a drive, you might think you could recover deleted files by manipulating the filesystem directly on a jailbroken device. Unfortunately, you can't recover files this way from an iPhone as the filesystem is encrypted. Even if you could find bits of the data, you'd not be able to decrypt them. Each file has its own encryption key, and those keys are discarded on deletion.
Apple's iOS Security Guide covers this briefly on page 17 in the 'architecture overview':
Every time a file on the data partition is created, Data Protection creates a new 256-bit key (the “per-file” key) and gives it to the hardware AES engine, which uses the key to encrypt the file as it is written to flash memory using AES-XTS mode. On devices with an A7, S2, or S3 SoC, AES-CBC is used. The initialization vector is calculated with the block offset into the file, encrypted with the SHA-1 hash of the per-file key.
Mounting can work well for getting to extant files, but it's not much help for recovery. For that, you either need an iTunes or iCloud backup, data synced with the iCloud, or a forensic image of the device from before the data was deleted.
Bonus: mounting your Windows computer from your iPhone or iPad
iOS 13 saw the introduction of SMB support to iOS. This allows users to remotely access drives on Windows computers. This is how it works:
- Find the IP address of your Windows computer. The
ipconfig
command should tell you this. - On the Windows computer, right-click the folder you'd like to share and choose
Properties
→Sharing
→Advanced sharing
. Click 'Share this folder'. - In the Sharing tab, select
Share..
, then in the drop-down menu select your user account, add it, and make sure it has 'Read / write' permissions. Click 'Share' and 'Apply', and close the window. - On your iOS device, open Apple's 'Files' app, tap 'Connect to a server'. Type
smb://
followed by the IP address of your PC. Then choose 'Registered user' and enter your Windows account name and password.
With this done, your Windows drive should appear on the iOS device.
Summary: External hard drive not mounting on Mac means that you can't access data stored on it. This page helps you mount external hard drives, as well as SD cards and USB flash drives, etc. on Mac. If the external hard drive won't mount on Mac, you can download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover lost data from unmountable external hard drives.
Usually, an external hard drive will appear (aka mounted) automatically on your Mac once you plug it in, and you can access data on this drive. So, it's annoying when you find that your external hard drive is not mounting or recognized by your Mac, just like the user below.
'I have a 500 GB LaCie external hard drive, formatted as macOS Extend journaled on MacBook Pro 2014 and I have been using it to do Time Machine backups. Now after updating, macOS is not mounting this external hard drive. The main drive is greyed out in Disk Utility and the partition is not showing up. I can't do First Aid as my LaCie external drive does not mount on the MacBook Pro. Any ideas? Thanks!'
Wondering 'why my external hard drives won't mount on Mac'? This post explains the reasons and teachs how to fix this disk problem without losing data.
- Table of contents
- 1. Dos and don'ts of unmounting external HDD on Mac problem
- 2. How to fix external hard drive not mounting on Mac issue without data loss?
- 3. Why an external hard drive won't mount on Mac?
- 4. Knowledge Base: what does it mean to mount a hard drive on Mac?
Dos and Don'ts When External Hard Drive Not Mounting on Mac
Before you go further, it's better to know what you can do and can't do.
1. Do not go straight to reformat this not mounted external hard drive, especially when you have important files on it. Reformatting will wipe the data on this disk and cause serious data loss.
2. Do not run First Aid to directly repair the disk, any further operation is very likely to overwrite your original files and make them unrecoverable.
3. Check if you have a copy of a data backup. If not, recover important files from this unmountable external hard drive first to avoid data loss.
Now, let's make the external disk accessible on Mac.
How to fix external hard drives not mounting on Mac issue without data loss?
To access your external hard drive on Mac, try solutions suggested in this part one by one. Hopefully, you'll be able to open this external hard drive on Mac again.
First, try some simple tricks to mount external hard drive on Mac
Mount Device Machine
In case you miss anything necessary, you can first have some basic checks as following:
1. Re-plug your external hard drive to another port or try another USB cable. A faulty connection, though it is foolproof, might be the key fix if LaCie thunderbolt drive is not mounting, in that users always forget to check if the port is wobbly or if the cable is broken.
2. Try a super slow jam. Strange but true, some users found that their external will mount properly when they plug it in exceptional slow motion. However, if they try and plug in the external hard drive normally, the Mac doesn't recognize the disk.
3. Check your Finder Preferences. When your external hard drive does not appear on the desktop, you can open Finder, choose 'Preference' (or press Command +, ) and check 'External disks' both in General tab and in Sidebar tab to show your external hard drive on your Mac computer.
If Mac could not mount the external hard drive on desktop still, let's troubleshoot this issue with the following solutions.
Solution 1:Force mount this external hard drive in Disk Utility
If you can't find the external hard drive on the desktop or in the Finder, you can try to make the disk online manually in Disk Utility (a native disk management tool in your Mac).
Here is how to mount an external hard drive on Mac:
1. Click Go at the upper left of your desktop and go to Utilities, then launch Disk Utility on your Mac computer.
2. Click on 'Show All Devices' in View option to list or connected drives.
3. Choose the grayed external hard drive in the left sidebar.
3. Select Mount in the top center of Disk Utility.
Mount Device Manager
However, if you find that your external hard drive is not showing up in Disk Utility (not a single volume but the whole disk disappears), it is very likely that your disk is suffering some physical damage. In this case, you need to send it to a local data recovery service. But if the Mount option is grayed out and you can see this external hard drive in Disk Utility, you can try another solution then.
Solution 2:Repair this unmountable external hard drive with First Aid
The second suggestion is First Aid in Disk Utility if you are unable to mount the external hard drive on Mac. First Aid is a very simple tool that is built in your Mac, and it is able to detect and repair directory damage and other disk errors. You are advised to run the tool more than once to ensure you are receiving a consistent result.
Follow the instructions and repair the external hard drive that is not accepted by your macOS or Mac OS X.
1. Go to Utilities and launch Disk Utility on your Mac computer.
2. Select the unmountable external hard drive on the left sidebar.
3. Select First Aid in the top center and click Run.
Solution 3:Reformat the unmounted external hard drive
If your external hard drive still can't be mounted in Disk Utility after you perform First Aid, or if First Aid failed to repair it like the situation below, your drive should have some serious errors like file system corruption.
• Disk Utility can't repair this disk, what do to?
• How to format external hard drives on Mac?
In this case, you need to back up your important data on the external hard drive, such as family photos, valuable work documents, or any other files. If you don't have a copy of a data backup in hand, the following guide can help you recover lost data from this unmountable external hard drive. And then, you can reformat your exteranl hard drive to make it work again on Mac.
How to recover data from an external hard drive that won't mount?
As long as your external hard drive doesn't have any hardware problem, fortunately, you can retrieve your files with professional Mac data recovery software - iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac with no fuss. Office professional plus 2013 mac.
Best External Hard Drive Data Recovery - iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac
- Recover lost data from unmountable, formatted, inaccessible, unreadable, corrupted external hard drives.
- Supported storage devices: external hard drives, USB flash drives, memory cards, SD cards, etc.
- Supported file types: photos, videos, audio files, documents, emails, etc.
- Suppported Mac OS: macOS 10.15/10.14/10.13/10.12 and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7.
Read-only & risk-free
Tutorial for external hard drive data recovery on Mac with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac
1. Free download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on Mac.
2. Launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
3. Select the external hard drive that is not mounting and click Scan button to scan for all lost data.
4. Preview the searching results, choose files you need, and click Recover to get them back.
Note: You need to save the recovered files to another usable drive. By this means, you will not lose them again when you move forward to the steps to fix not mounted external hard drives in the following part.
5. Have a check to ensure you have got all lost data back.
After having successfully restored all data on this drive, you can set out to erase this external hard drive to fix the disk not mounting on Mac issue.
Tutorial to reformat unmountable external hard drives on Mac
1. Launch Disk Utility.
2. Click the icon of your unmountable external hard drive on the left sidebar.
3. Click on the Erase button function on the top of the Disk Utility window.
4. Complete the related information (name, format, scheme), then click Erase button to finish reformatting.
After reformatting, your external hard drive will be assigned with a new file system so that you can mount this unmountable hard drive again.
Then, why we can't access the external hard drive on Mac?
Probably, the user above would never know why his MacBook is not mounting the external hard drive. As a matter of fact, this problem could be caused by many factors, such as damaged file system, virus attack, unsafe ejection or any other improper operations.
Here are some common ones.
- A damaged file system: If your external hard drive is attacked by virus or if you abruptly eject this drive, it's likely that the file system of this disk would be damaged or corrupted. As a result, the operating system is unable to recognize this disk, and the disk will not be mounted or read by macOS.
- Connection problems: Another reason that hard drive won't mount on Mac could be a dirty or loose connection between your cable, USB-C multi-adapter, Thunderbolt 3, or other connecting ports. A clear, clean, snug and fit tightly connection is the premise of mounting an external hard drive successfully.
- Hardware issue: Also, problems related to hardware could also make the disk unmountable, especially when your external hard drive has too much bad sectors or have been physically damaged.
Mount Device Meaning
Knowledge Base: What does 'Mount' mean on Mac?
Mounting an external hard disk means the macOS gives a mount point (entrance) to read and access information on the hard drive. Information is accessed by the disk file system and partition table. So, it's a necessary step before the operating system can access a disk (including read from and write to).
Therefore, if an externalhard drive won't mount on Mac, it means the system gets into trouble in recognizing the file system or other information of this hard drive.
Mount Device Mac Air
Winrar auf mac installieren. Conclusion:
If your external hard drive is not mounting on your Mac, don't panic. Most of the time, you are going to fix this disk problem with the solutions above. Moreover, if you worry about data loss when the disk becomes unmountable, you can use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover your files first. Remember that, no matter what disk problem you meet, you should perform hard drive data recovery in case of losing data.