Sandisk external drive not showing up on mac only on windows

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Sandisk external drive not showing up on mac only on windows

I updated to tahoe, and now my drive doesn't show up on my mac, or even in disk utility. It does show up on my friends windows pc, but for some reason not on my mac. I tried booting in safe mode, tried a different usbc cable, and different ports.

It's formated as exfat.

It does work but it just only shows up on windows.

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 26.0

Posted on Oct 31, 2025 8:29 AM

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Answer 1

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Tesserax

Level 10

157,560 points

Oct 31, 2025 8:52 AM in response to lucidife

I suggest trying the following to see if anything helps:

Check System Information > USB — See if the drive even appears in the USB tree. If it does, that means macOS sees it at a hardware level but isn’t mounting it.
Try mounting manually via Terminal — Open Terminal and run diskutil list to see if it appears as an unmounted disk. If it’s there, try diskutil mountDisk /dev/diskX (replacing X with the correct number).
Some SanDisk drives may require drivers. If yours does, try either reinstalling them or check the SanDisk support site for updated one.
Lastly, try testing in macOS Recovery — Boot into Recovery (hold power until “Options” appears), open Disk Utility there, and check if it shows up.

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