Have you ever met the case that when you connect an external drive to your Mac computer, a message pops out “the disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”? Recently, this topic is widely discussed in many forums. Obviously, many ordinary people don’t know how to solve it.
The Disk You Inserted Was Not Readable by This Computer – Fix
Actually, when you insert a corrupted external storage device—like an external hard drive, USB flash drive, and SD card—into your PC or Mac, error messages will come out to break off the connection to a computer.
In general, this error message means that the drive turns corrupted. Following reasons may cause this problem.
- Virus attack
- Damaged file system
- Catalog file corruption
- Improper ejection of the external drive
- Encryption of the drive
- Sudden shutdown of the computer
- …
How to Identify Whether the Disk Is Corrupted or Not
Step 1. Check which device has a problem
Find another external storage device to plug it into the Mac. If you can see it in Finder, which indicates the problem lies in the external drive, not the Mac.
Step 2. Check the file system format
Check the external hard drive to see whether the file system format is NTFS or FAT32. If the file system format is NTFS, it is understand why it is unreadable on Mac. To correct it, convert NTFS to FAT32.
STEP 3. Run First Aid to Check the Volume for Errors
As a built-in function on Mac OS, first aid can check and repair file system errors for many external drives. So, run it to check and solve the problem that the disk you inserted was not readable problem. You can do it as follows:
1. Enter Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
2. Choose the corrupted external drive and right click on it. Activate Run First Aid option from the popup menu.
Recover Data and Erase the Drive to Normal State
If you want to recover the important data from the corrupted drive, you’d better choose a safe and professional Mac data recovery application. MiniTool Mac Data Recovery (20% Discounted Link) can meet your needs perfectly.
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1.Open MiniTool Mac Data Recovery Demo Edition and choose Damaged Partition Recovery from its main interface.
2. Choose the unreadable drive and activate Full Scan to begin. It will take a while to complete the scanning process, depending on the total volume and occupied space.
3. When the scan ends, it’s time for you to choose the files. You can use the Setting feature to find some specific files quickly.
4. Selecting all needed files, and press Save to restore them to another intact drive. After finishing these operations, you can visit the specified location to check whether the recovered files can be opened normally.
And that’s all for the whole process of the corrupted drive recovery. With this concise interface of this reliable data recovery program and operating steps, you can accomplish data recovery easily.
Note: Please do not save the selected files to the original drive for fear that the lost or deleted files could be occupied and get irrecoverable.
Erase the Drive to the Normal State
After recovering data from the corrupted drive, you can choose to erase the drive that was not readable by your Mac to a normal state, so that you can use it again.
Following this guide, we will show you the detailed steps to erase an unreadable external drive on Mac.
1. Go to this interface: Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
2. Select the unreadable drive and click Erase button on the top side.
3. Arrange a new name and suitable format for the drive.
After finishing erasing the drive, you can check whether it gets a normal state or not. If it is still not readable by the computer, it may get physically damaged. You need to buy a new hard drive.
I hope this tutorial helped you to fix the error The Disk You Inserted Was Not Readable by this computer. If you like this fix, please share it and follow whatvwant on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for more tips.