External hard drives not recognized by new imac

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I recently purchased a 27 inch iMac and I am unable to get my external hard drives to mount. One is a new seagate and the other is a simpletech that is several years old. Both are NTFS formatted and neither of them show up on desk utility or system profiler. I downloaded Tuxera NTFS-3G but that did not help. Both external hard drives work on my PC laptop and on a friends 24 inch iMac. I know the USB ports work because I have a card reader and a flash drive that work no problem. Anybody have any idea what might be the problem?
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
If neither of them are showing up from Disk Utility or the System Profiler, it could be caused by too much power being drawn from the USB ports or the ports are not working right. Card readers and flash drives generally draw very little power compared to most hard drives or an iPod.

You might want to run the Apple Hardware Test on your machine to see if anything shows up.
 
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Ok. I tried 2 other hard drives, one formatted NFTS and the other some Windows format, and they both worked. I'm baffled.
 
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21.5" iMac i5 2.9 Ghz, 15" MBPro i7 2.0 Ghz, iPhone 5, iPhone 4s, ATV2, ATV3, iPad2, iPad Mini
USB Power

If neither of them are showing up from Disk Utility or the System Profiler, it could be caused by too much power being drawn from the USB ports or the ports are not working right. Card readers and flash drives generally draw very little power compared to most hard drives or an iPod.

You might want to run the Apple Hardware Test on your machine to see if anything shows up.

It still might be the USB Power as the other units you tried might draw less power.

Are you plugging the driver directly into the computer?

DavidH
 
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I think you're right. I tried two smaller external hard drives and they both worked fine on my iMac. Both of the hard drives that fail to mount are much larger (320GB and 500GB) with external power supplies. These do, however, work on an older 24 inch iMac. This is actually my 2nd 27 inch iMac in a month because Apple replaced the original with the exact same problem. Is this a common problem for them I wonder?
 

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