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.

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

This doesn't really help. I don't want to lose all the info I have on my external drive. You've made it sound like it's the drive issue but it's really with how the new Catalina update is working to read these drives. Please provide a better fix. I need drive access without reformatting & it's worked fine up till the latest update.

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!"

@Starburns we shouldn't have to look for alternative solutions to get assets off of external drives. It's insane. @Apple needs to respond to this thread. There's 13 pages of 'try this' and 'try that', most of which fail. I work with video files that are on multiple drives and I need to swap out drives daily. I should just be able to plug in the hard drive and bam, there it is on my desktop and ready to use.

I found fsck.hsl in the activity monitor under the 'disk' tab - I forced quit this and the an error message came up to say that the disc cannot be repaired but the drive mounted immediately and I can now copy my files to another external drive.

Hi, what do the commands below mean or do?

$ ps -ef | grep fsck

$ sudo kill [pid from above]

im having trouble with my external hard drive as I won't mount. I was going to try this but don't have a clue what it would even do! im not too good with computers (sorry if this is a stupid question)

I first tried to repair the drive (go to Utility > Disk Utility) then finding and selecting my external drive (which was displayed but greyed out) then hit the first aid button and then wait for the first aid repair to fail. This would fail on the fsck.hsl. Find the fsck.hsl file in your activity monitor (open this app) then under the 'disk' tab force quit this file name (search for it) and the drive should mount immediately. You can now copy your files to another external drive. Good luck

So I tried everything, absolutely EVERYTHING and currently I have Catalina, tried to update to Big Sur but since I have a MacBook Air I don't have a lot of space for that. What worked for me was going to Launch Pad - Open Activity Monitor - and then Force Quit fsck_ext. After that my external hard drive magically appeared on my screen again! I was this close "." to buy a new hard drive.

On my system, I just have to wait for some time till I can mount my external drive (SD, for example).

Seems like Catalina runs fsck on them if they were not safely removed last time.

Drive mounts itself after it's checked for errors. It just takes time.

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

The reason for this is that Apple removed support for HFS file system in MacOS Catalina.

Various options exist to access CDs, HDs or other images with this file system.

For a discussion, see:

http://www.matthewhughes.co.uk/how-to-mount-hfs-classic-drives-on-macos-catalina-and-later/

and

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/389186/reading-hfs-standard-and-mfs-on-catalina

I recently purchased a new IMac and upgraded it to Catalina. BIG mistake!! I have this same problem and it will not mount any external hard drives. These drives all still work fine on my old macBook running Mojave 10.14.1. This problem started when I Accidentally unplugged a drive and didn't trash the icon first. Another problem is Disk Utility and some other programs will not respond to a QUIT command. The only way to get them to quit is to force quit them. I assume you will have a fix soon???

I'm having a similar issue - "com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 0." since the Catalina upgrade.

I've a partitioned 2Tb drive - half I drag & drop files to, the other half is for Time Machine. I have another disc that I use as a backup for the files/data but not as Time Machine.

My partition for dragging files into mounts but the Time Machine partition won't. It wt was last seen in action trying to backup a few days ago but announced it had insufficient space.

An ideas?

I'll also post on a Time Machine forum

Hi friend. I had your problem and since I saw your comment I searched for like 3 or 4 days and finally I found the solution:

Go to www.Tuxera.com and download it for mac.

After installation , your mac will restart. after that you're good to go.

Just plug your Hard Drive in and use it.

Simple as that

It worked for me. Hope it works for you too.