External hard drive not mounting in OS X High Sierra

After several recent incidents in my university regarding fire and water damage I decided to take my backup strategy more seriously and overall minimize my data-loss anxiety (yes this is a made up/real thing now and we live with it).

I bought the cheapest 1TB external hard drive I could find but when I plugged it in my mac (running High Sierra version: 10.13.4) the finder could not “see” the drive and it was not mounted. I was getting this pop up window

When opening disk utility my external hard drive was showing up but it was grayed out. I could not mount my hard drive and it would not let me repair, erase, nor partition it.

I did some research and several people were facing similar issues. I tied several suggestions like opening disk utility>selecting your dive> and trying first aid or downloading Paragon which did not seem to fix the issue.

The solution that worked for me was this.

(Note that if this happens to you but not for a new out of the box hard drive, you may need to follow a different procedure to recover your data. What I’m describing below erases your hard drive completely. So lets proceed:

Open up disk utility, go to the top left of the view and select show all devices.

Once you do this you can now click your drive > then click erase>name your hard drive>format chose Mac OS Extended (Journaled)> Scheme: GUID Partition Map> click erase.

And once finished your drive should be as good as new and you can carry on with your internet procrastination relaxed knowing that you can now save your work (once you do some) to your hard drive.