An external disk refuses to mount, com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930868.

I ran into this issue with a Western Digital 2TB drive... I had seen some irreperable disk errors and was ironically, attempting to back the drive up so I could reformat it... so, I was panicking because I've got some important data on the drive and was starting to research data recovery tools. After messing around and doing some research, I discovered the system was trying to run a filesystem check on it and was getting hung up.

I opened a terminal window and entered the following commands

$ ps -ef | grep fsck  
$ sudo kill [pid from above] 

BAM! Disk mounted just like that.

At this point, I opened Disk Utility and ran First Aid... which ironically unmounted the drive and then got hung up again... DUH! So had to repeat the process. At this point, with the drive mounted, I backed up the drive and reformatted it.

Hope this helps.

I was getting a volume that refused to mount and was 'greyed out' in the disk utility.

• I ran First Aid on the Disk
  • It Returned with "Invalid Content in Journal" bla bla bla and then it said successfully repaired.
  • It was not repaired
• Then I turned off Journaling for the drive in question using steps found here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/invalid-content-in-journal.1941721/
• The disk Immediately mounted upon the next attempt all data in-tact.

Hope this helps someone with similar symptoms (i.e. Drive won't mount + First Aid returns "Invalid Journal Contents")

Cheers

An update to my previous post: I think the external drive did not show up because it was not properly ejected before being disconnected. When the drive is reconnected OS X starts an automatic disk check (fsck) and the drive will not show up until this process is done. This can take a long time for large disk with multiple TBs of data.

The com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error is caused by the running fsck process.

Force quitting fsck will only give you read-only access to the drive. After force quitting it I manually started a "first aid" fsck from the OS X disk utility. This took a long time. After it was done I could eject and reconnect the drive and this time everything was OK.

Suggest people just leave the fsck_ext process running and wait for it complete. I think the problem will fix itself if you just give it time to do its job (can take many hours for a large drive).

Poor or interrupted disk not ejected properly. My MacOS Catalina 10.15.7 upgrade disconnected my external drives and one of the did not come back. All I had to do is kill the fsck_hfs. You may have a different fsck running depending on the type of partition you built. killing fsck will not hurt anything and it should relaunch. You can find it in either terminal and type "top" find "fsck" type running, quit top and type "kill -9 (PID#). You can also find it in Activity Monitor double click the process and click "Quit" or "Force Quit". You may have to enter in your administrator creds. Once I killed "fsck_hfs" the disk mounted and I could run repair on the disk just to be sure the disk was good.

I Had the same issue, looking for answer what user "mac1317" replied was resolved my issue which was: "Open Activity monitor and forse quit there fsck_ext. Will solve issuer. "

It was very helpful, Thanks very much user "mac1317!"

I found a solution on Medium that solved the problem! The article is in Mandarin so I'll type the solution below.

I had the same problem, I'm using a Lacie 5TB external drive. I accidently removed it from my macbook (Catalina) without ejecting it, and it stopped mounting. It shows the grey icon in the Disk Utilities, but my macbook just couldn't read it.

1. Open your Terminal application. You can find it in your Application folder.
2. Type in: ps aux | grep fsck (and then press enter)
3. If you see something like this :

root 2398 2.6 0.1 4352836 11660 ?? Us 10:02 0:02.31 /System/Library/Filesystems/exfat.fs/Contents/Resources/fsck_exfat -y -x /dev/rdisk3s2

• It means that rdisk3s2 is now occupied by the fsck_exfat command, so the status is busy and cannot be mounted.

4.Type in: sudo kill -9 {pid}

• {pid} means the number on your command results, in this case it will be 2398 (I didn't really understand this part so I just typed in sudo kill -9 {pid}, and it showed that I needed to enter a password that I had no idea of, I then typed in again sudo kill -9 2398, it still showed that I needed password. After around 3 minutes, suddenly my external hard drive works again )

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Hope this helps!

For anyone who gets this issue in future, open 'Activity Monitor' ---> search "fsck" ---> check all tabs (CPU, Memory, etc.) i got it in "Disk" tab ---> 'Force quit' the process --------> Your disk will show up. :-)

I wasted few hours on this after i "not safely" removed my hard drive. Just end the fsck process and it should work. It worked for me.

Hi everyone!! I believe I solved this problem (after trying literally everything in this thread). I was transferred from Apple support person to apple support person but finally one of them went to Apple engineering and figured it out.

It might be different for you guys and it's an excruciating process. But first, we went into go > library > launch agents and then isolated every single file (put it into a new folder, restarted, tried mounting) and nothing was fixed.

Then we went into launchdaemons and isolated every file in it again. It turns out for me, it was coming from an Application my company installed called DGAgent or something and we suspect it wasn't updated for Catalina and Big Sur. The file was called "com.verdasys.dgagent.plist". I uninstalled the software and made sure this file wasn't in the LaunchDaemons folder anymore and my issue was solved.

I believe the issue for everyone is probably coming from one of the files in these two folders.

Answer: it's frustrating, but you have to wait. As per earlier responses: "[the] Drive mounts itself after it's checked for errors. It just takes time."

Here's what's going on: likely, you removed the drive manually last time instead of ejecting it (i.e. unsafely). This forces Catalina (and maybe some other OSs, I haven't checked) to run a safety check on the data in each partition on that drive once it's reinserted to make sure nothing's corrupted. If you look at the operations using CPU time on Activity Monitor (or similar), you'll see something called 'diskarbitrationd' utilizing around 50% cpu. That's the scanning process at work. If you don't see that, something else might be up. If you do... yeah, just wait. It'll mount eventually, and provided you eject safely in the future, this'll be a one-time thing.

I just ran into this problem. In disk utility make certain that you're seeing all of the drive and partitions via the view button in the upper left hand portion of the screen. View all.

I had been trying first aid on the named partition and not having any luck. If you attempt first aid on the 'master boot' main part of the drive (usually has the manufacturers name, Apple, Samsung, Western Digital, etc. ), I had success bringing the drive back up that way.

I've been confused that the new OS doesn't show me all of the drive in disk utility. Let me know if that works.

com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930868

I had this problem with an external USB drive. For me this problem occurred whilst attempting to create a boot device (disk) for ubuntu using the Etcher app. The process had completed successfully it rendered the device unusable as it would not mount and was not recognised by the system.

Try this, it worked for me:

1. With the device (disk) inserted, open Utilities → Disk Utility. You will see the disk shown as /dev/diskxax (x=numeric a=alpha) i.e. /dev/disk5s2
2. Click on View (top left of window) and select “Show all devices” from the drop-down. The name of the actual physical device will be shown (i.e. “ScanDisk Cruzer Blade... or whatever your device is).
3. The /dev/diskxax is shown under the name of the physical disk. It will present as faded (grayed out) text. It will not be mounted.
4. Select the physical disk. It will present in the main box with a red bar with the legend underneath the bar in small letters with the size of the drive.
5. Select “Erase” from the options at the top of the Disk Utility window.
6. Enter the desired name for the device and select your desired filesystem.
7. Click on “Erase” and then select “Show details”.
8. Once the erase and format of the disk is completed the disk will present as mounted and the /dev/diskxax will be shown in a normal state (i.e. not grayed out).
9. The device is now ready for use.

Thanks!!!! I have the same issue and this worked for me. After force quitting fsck_ext from the activity monitor my disk mounted with the message that I can read but no longer write to the disk. Now I think I can back it up :)

This is the exact answer that works... I keep having this problem using a 5TB external HD (it came as Exfat - so I have kept it like that so I can plug it in to my PCs also). But quite regularly it has this "mount" problem which is really getting irritating.

This answer took me to the exact problem in Activity Monitor - I just searched for fsck in the top right search bar. Eventually it showed the fsck process. The very second I killed the process the external drive way instantly visible.

Thanks Dahn for your persistent answer to this problem. It is the only one that works. Appreciate it!

I had the same problem on a drive that was partitioned into a data section and Time Machine partition. Pretty new drive and onlh one partition pulled the error and would not mount.

I solved it by "viewing all devices" in Disk Utility then running first aid on the whole device. For a few seconds the partition was still red (ng) but after toggling view it is all good now.

I think the device was ejected "by hand" and the Time Machine might have been in the middle of a back up and so the system threw up.

Try this fix, it is scary to run First Aid on the whole drive, but it worked.

Open Activity Monitor > highlight Disk and search for fsck > Double click fsck > click Quit > choose Force Quit, the external drive immediately appeared on the desktop with full access to all files