external Harddrive not showing in finder.

Debra Jordan wrote:

I have used my Seagate Plus Portable drive with my former MacBook Pro. I replaced that computer appx 6 months ago with a new laptop that is running Sequoia 15.3.2

The drive shows up in Disk Untilies named Seagate and Unknown-Windows NT File Systems.

I tried a different USB adaptor and a different USB port and there is no change.

I ran FistAid and tried mounting the drive in Disc Utilities.

I shutdown and restarted. Nothing I have tried will get the drive to show up in Finder.

I plugged the drive into a PC and all the files are there and work fine.

As I mentioned this external drive worked fine with my old Macbook Pro.

I am not a high level Mac users so I have done all that I know to do.

Any ideas?

Thank you for any answers you can provide.

Finder>Settings>Sidebar>Locations>External disk...(?)

Verify the caret is spun open in Locations...

Sequoia has limited support for NTFS-formatted drives.

If your drive doesn’t contain any important data, you might want to try formatting it as APFS or HFS+, which are natively supported by macOS. After reformatting, check if the issue persists.

Guide: Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

If you need the drive to work with both Windows and macOS, you can format it as ExFAT or FAT32. These formats are cross-platform compatible. However, just a heads-up — many users have reported a poor experience using ExFAT drives with Sequoia.

isn't displaying it in Finder because it's formatted in NTFS, a Windows file system. macOS can usually read NTFS drives but sometimes fails to mount them automatically, especially on newer versions.

Since the drive shows up in Disk Utility as "Windows NT File System" and works fine on a PC, the issue isn't with the drive or cable—it's a compatibility limitation.

First, check Finder settings by going to Finder > Settings > Sidebar and making sure "External disks" is selected. If it still doesn't show, you can install third-party NTFS drivers like Paragon NTFS or Tuxera NTFS, which let macOS fully access NTFS drives.

Alternatively, if you plan to use the drive across both Windows and Mac often, you can back up the data, reformat the drive to exFAT using Disk Utility, and copy the files back—exFAT is fully compatible with both systems