Cannot connect SSD to a Mac computer

Macs and MacOS
1

Hi all! I have a Dell Win 10 computer, on which I installed SSD to secure boot and tpm, with Bitlocker being set as off. Trouble started when I purchased a new SSD and wanted to make good use of the old one by making it as an external drive for my Mac computer. When I connect them through USB cable, the Mac OS does not recognise the drive and neither does Windows 10 virtual machine (on Mac).

So, where might the issue be: with USD cable, with SSD (I doubt it), or with Mac? Which device is not functioning as it should?

1 Like
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Hello @Parry
Welcome to community! :bouquet:

  1. Mac supports HFS file system and it does not support ntfs,
    may be if you are using old harddisk which you were using with Windows 10
    you can use exFAT for using in MAC OS it support windows and as well as MAC
  2. If your hard disk is not detecting in Dell Windows 10, may be it is a problem of USB cable.
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Hello

First of all you need to check your USB cable. try to use another one. then check SSD, install it in your Dell and check if it’s boot.

4

A new internal drive normally ships unformatted. Unless the operating system on the old boot drive posts a dialog box offering to format the unrecognized drive, the computer doesn’t “detect” anything because there isn’t anything the operating system can speak to yet.

Of course, if the way you installed this SSD was to remove the previous internal HD and install the SSD in its place, without formatting the new SSD and installing a bootable operating system first, then there’s no operating system or formatting utility at all.

What steps have you already taken? If you can give us a detailed list of the things you’ve already done, in order, it will be easier to determine where the problem is.

A common technique to replace an internal boot HD with an SSD would be to:

  1. attach the SSD as an external drive first through USB/FireWire/ Thunderbolt
  2. use Disk Utility to format the SSD
  3. clone the operating system+user data from the internal HD to the external SSD using Disk Utility, SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner (you can also do a clean operating system install by downloading an installer from the App Store and installing it on the new drive)
  4. then open up the computer and swap the drives

That way, once you restart the reassembled computer, you can at least be sure that there’s a drive with a bootable operating system available. If you’re following the technique I’ve outlined, it’s wise to try booting from the new external SSD before installing it internally, just to make sure the computer recognizes the drive as bootable.