How To Open Thumb Drive On Mac Computer?

A new MacBook user or having a corrupted thumb drive? Don’t struggle. We will show you how to open thumb drive on Mac and what to do if it doesn’t work.

Accessing a Thumb drive a.k.a. USB Drive on a Mac is normally an easy task. But in case you are a new user or your thumb drive is defaulted, you can face some issues. We will tell you step by step how to open a thumb drive on a Mac Computer.

Easy Steps To Follow:

Find Your USB Drive on the Desktop, First of all, find the USB drive on the Desktop of your Mac. Then connect your USB Drive to the computer and click the yellow minimize button in the top-left corner of all your open windows to reveal the Desktop. If you can see an icon representing your USB drive, just double-click to access it. In case the icon is not seeable to you, in the next point, we will show you how to find the USB drive icon by using the Finder on your computer. (Finder is the Apple company’s equivalent to File Explorer in Windows).
Use the Finder to find your USB Drive To open it, click the blue smiley face on the left side of the row of icons at the bottom of the screen. If you can’t see the row of icons on the bottom of your Mac Computer, just move your mouse to the very bottom of the screen to make it come up.
Once the Finder Window is open, go to the left sidebar of the page.
Find a heading named Locations. Under this, you will find your USB Drive.
If still, the icon has not been found, go to the menu bar at the top of the screen
Look for the Preferences tab
Then click the Sidebar tab and make sure External disks under the Locations heading are enabled.
Once done, you will be able to open your USB Drive a.k.a. Thumb drive on your Mac Computer.

Followed the above steps, but still failed in the attempt of opening the thumb drive on the mac computer? It means there’s either a problem with the drive or it’s set to a format that doesn’t work with the Mac Computer.

Need To Check The Format Of The Drive!

To check the USB drive format:

Press Cmd(the command key, ⌘)+ Space to open Spotlight, then type “Disk Utility” and shoot Enter to set up the Disk Utility.
From this application, select your USB drive from the sidebar to reveal the drive format that is situated beneath its name.

In case this also doesn’t work! This implies that there is a problem with the physical structure of the drive or the USB port of the Mac Computer.

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Check For The Physical Drive Problems

Try using a different drive or a different port instead. If in a different port also, the drive doesn’t work, then it is for sure that there is a problem with the drive only.

There could be one more issue arising in the process. Suppose, your drive opens up on the Mac Computer, but it appears empty; it could be a problem with the types of files you’re trying to transfer. Not all file types work with Mac computers. Take a look online to make sure the files you’re trying to transfer to the Mac are compatible with them. Content check is a must in this case.

Sometimes regardless of all attempts, the USB doesn’t open on your Mac. Well, in this case, it’s often easier to resort to a distant storage type to transfer your data, like cloud storage.

You can connect your thumb drive to another computer and transfer the data to a cloud storage device and you can access them from your Mac Computer directly.