Catalina 10.15 and external hard drive issues

**** BEFORE CONSIGNING TO BIN OR REFORMATTING ****

I have had this happen on numerous drives, including one that I formatted especially using Catalina. The issues all arise from the MAC going to sleep with the external drive connected. It seems to cause the drive to get into a state where Catalina will simply not mount it.

I have used ExFAT every time as the drive Format and on EVERY occasion my Windows 10 workstation has mounted the drive and reported it has issues. The Windows Scan and Repair function has worked EVERY time to repair the drive so that it is able mounted by Catalina. I tried the disk repair utility on Catalina and it could not resolve the issues.

You have to unmount all externally mounted storage before you reboot/shut-down the workstation running Catalina. This is the only way I have been able to have the drives remain in a consistently operative state. Clearly this is not acceptable, as you want to leave the option to sleep active...

It IS a Catalina issue and Apple need to urgently address this fundamental flaw in their OS. I cannot believe this simple regression test was missed before Catalina went out of beta.

Please, please try the Windows repair before reformatting your drives! You have nothing to lose and your valuable data to regain.

Best wishes to all of you.

Teddy

Macs need special software to read and write to NTFS drives. The software that was installed previous to your upgrade to Catalina was removed during the upgrade. Reinstall whatever NTFS software you had, probably Paragon, in order to access that drive again.

Managed to resolve this (I hope) by following this advice from another forum on this website:

Oct 15, 2019 1:29 AM in response to alancraigmackie

I had the same issue, I have Seagate External Drive so I downloaded the "Paragon Drive" from Seagate's website and now is back to normal. https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/

I solved my drive problem!!! Sort of

I had same issue... I have mac bookpro with USB-C ports. I moved the power supply connection from a docking station directly to the mac and it worked. - As i monkeyed with it... it seems that too many usb connections results in a lack of power for the hard drive. At one point I got a popup on my mac that said "Not enough available power for external devices..."

This is a Catalina issue as it did not occur until the upgrade.

When you reformat the drive you will lose all of the files on it so back it up before reformatting.

With the drive mounted launch Disk Utility and do the following:

1 - click on the top icon of the drive

2 - click on erase button:

3 - set the format and scheme to what's shown in this screenshot:

How is the drive formatted and connected to your Mac? Are you using the Seagate software that came with the drive? If so you should remove it as it's not needed and only interferes with the system drive management software.

I keep having issues where the external drive is not recognised by the OS. Somethimes Catalina cannot Eject the disk despite there being no residual tasks shown, even checking in Terminal. The ironic thing is that my Windows 10 machine recognises the disk and that it has errors, and it then repairs it. If you let your machine go to sleep you may also encounter this issue. Hopefully you have access to a Windows machine to repair it.

It would seem that Catalina has issues surrounding externally mounted hardware!

I have found that Windows 10 will see the drives and state that it has errors that need to be repaired. I f you perform a scan and repair it seems to address the issue and it will the Catalina will recognise the drive. I use my external drive to store a lot of music samples for my music production and this is getting very annoying. i have had to repair the drive about 7 times now. Have done testing using my Windows machine and no issues. Have tried another drive on Catalina and same problems. A fix for this is urgently required!

Did the drive come with any software on it and, if so, did you install that software?

How is the drive formatted and connected to your Mac?

Have you tried the following?

1 - How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac. 

2 - Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac - Apple Support.

Log into another user account on your Mac and see if the problem persists there: How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac - Apple Support

I have no experience with Seagate drives but have had trouble-free use of Western Digital 1 TB and 2TB and Toshiba 3TB drives. In all cases I use my mac's Disk Utility app and erase and reformat the drive APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) . If they have been used before I use the more secure two-pass erasure just to be sure. Have had NO troubles since.

I was experiencing the same issues until I changed a setting in the Security & Privacy pane of System Preferences. Once I gave [insert name of backup software] Full Disk Access, it also gave Files and Folders access. Once saved, my backup software was able to access external hard drives and backed up normally. I hope this can help someone else who might be experiencing similar issues in being unable to access external hard drives after upgrading to OS Catalina.

Please, please, please try my previous advice before reformatting drives. In ALL cases I mounted the drives on a MS Win 10 workstation, used the disk repair utility and the drive mounted on my Mac without issue. Apple has dropped the ball on this and seems to be ignoring the problem by passing the buck. Something bug has changed in their core kernel code for how drive mounts are maintained. This problem has been going on too long and I suspect that the reason it is still going is that the change is such that it cannot be undone without causing other problems within Catalina and future code base. Apple is beginning to lose a lot of respect and credibility. They have had an extremely long time of being able to ride on their image. This is going. I have switched my music studio back to Windows now due to too many issues and time lost with my Mac....

Randino's advice is by far the best & as usual, the easiest.

I had the same issues where I could no longer write to an older Seagate Freeagent Go Flex HD 500GB.

Following Randino's advice, I simply added Time Machine to Full Disc Access & voila....I can now write/copy anything to this drive again.

Thank you Randino!

I believe I have narrowed down my issues (Finder locking up and not being able to relaunch, and then a force-shutdown and restart being required) to my external hard drive as well.

This system (iMac 21.5-inch, Late 2013) has been rock solid for some time, along with the 2TB, 2012 Lacie drive used for back-ups and videos that is constantly connected to it.

But since Catalina (10.15.1 installed as I type this), the Finder has locked up on a fairly regular basis. I am now ejecting my external hard drive regularly, and that seems to fix the issue.

It seems like I will have to buy a new external hard drive, unless Apple somehow addresses this issue in a forthcoming update.

The drives (I have used numerous) have no 3rd party software installed and were formatted using ExFAT. This problem is easily repeatable.

1. Format a drive.
2. Put the MAC to sleep without ejecting the external storage.
3. Restart MAC and drive will not be mounted.

I've tried Western Dig, Seagate and an SSD running off a simple SSD-USB interface.

There is nothing wrong with the drives in that Linux and Windows 10 can mount the drives, albeit with issues which can be fixed by the respective OSes.

Apple has screwed the pooch with this release...They cannot brush this off as being 3rd party software on devices as they state they are supported...