What's worse, they may damage the file system or partition table of this drive, resulting in disk corruption. Some common reasons, including sudden power failure, unsafe ejection, virus attacks could make the disk unrecognizable. Then what could be the cause of this problem? I know this because it appears in Disk Utility, but it's grayed out. I want to also mention that the computer reads the disk. The thing is, I was about to back up and of course, My External Hard Drive in Disk Utility Is Grayed Out!!! My life lives on this disk. "I've been Googling for solutions for the past seven hours. However, they have no idea exactly why their external hard drives are greyed out in Disk Utility, just like the user from the forum of MacRumors: Many users are confronted with this annoying issue and are looking for a feasible solution. Why external hard drives greyed out in Disk Utility? Therefore, let's first take a closer look at the reasons for this issue before you set about repairing your external hard drive that is faded in Disk Utility.
The symptoms of hard drive dimmed out in Disk Utility are different from case to case. Fix Erase option greyed out in Disk Utility Fix Partition option greyed out in Disk Utility Fix external drives won't mount in Disk Utility Fix greyed out external hard drives in Disk Utility Specifically, you might see one of these in Disk Utility:
That's to say, you have a great chance to repair it without data loss. You can calm down first because if you see the external hard drive in Disk Utility with some disk information, your external hard drive at least has no hardware errors. So, you launch Disk Utility to check this drive, only to find that the external hard drive is greyed out in Disk Utility. You plug an external hard drive into your Mac as normal, but the external hard drive is not showing up in Mac Finder nor on the desktop this time.