External drive won’t mount – How to fix Mac external hard drive

Your external hard drive won’t mount on your Mac.  How do you know? It says so!  Not good.  Not good at all.  What do you do?

You can try a few easy steps to fix your drive that won’t mount on your Mac:

1. First, try the obvious.  Try another USB port on your Mac.  
2. If that works, great! End of story.
3. If not, turn of your Mac.
4. Turn it on and hold the shift key as soon as you hear the chime.
5. It will check the startup disk and then hopefully fix your external drive
6. If that doesn’t work, you will probably have to bring it to an unmountable external drive Mac specialist.