Catalina 10.15 and external hard drive issues

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....

Old Toad - When I go into Disk Utility, the File system is "Microsoft NTFS", but I was previously able to mount/write onto the external hard drive on my High Sierra Macbook Pro. Based on an earlier comment, I downloaded Seagate's Paragon Driver software. It didn't work- although the external hard drive was listed on the Paragon dropdown menu, pressing "mount" didn't do anything. I still can't access the contents of the hard drive on my MacBook.

Another commenter suggested running disk repair utility on a Windows machine on these hard drives.... I am not a software person, so I'm flying blind here, but I am very nervous about doing that. The drives currently work flawlessly on Microsoft computers, and messing that up right now would throw a giant wrench in my work at the moment. Accessing the hard drives on my Mac is more of a convenience issue than a necessity at the moment , so I prefer to avoid messing with them.

I ordered a Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD. According to reviews, it works with both Catalina and Microsoft systems, which wasn't the case with all external hard drives I researched. I am hoping that if I set up the BarraCuda SSD on my current computer, I will be able to tell immediately if there are compatibility issues, and if there aren't, I'll just copy everything from my original hard drives onto the new hard drive. It's a clunky workaround, but I just can't afford to break my existing hard drives at the moment.

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.

I did download the Seagate-provided Paragon software from this page: https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/

Unfortunately, it didn't work.... until I saw this website!: https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/seagate-software-blocked-on-macos-007810en/ Apparently, although the Paragon software seemed to download correctly (I was able to open the software, see my hard drive, press the "mount" button, etc.), the download wasn't complete. I had to manually give approval to finish the download process, although I was never notified of this fact. I am now able to access and edit the hard drives. Eureka!

In case it's useful for others to see, here is a summary of the problem I encountered: After getting a new MacBook Pro, which came with Catalina, I used Time Machine to make a copy of my old computer, which had High Sierra. When I plugged in my external Seagate hard drives to the new computer, I was unable to mount the hard drives or access their contents. The hard drives were formatted as Microsoft NTFS, and had run perfectly fine on my old computer. Here's the solution that worked for me: 1) I downloaded NTSF software, which for me was Seagate's Paragon Driver; 2) I went to System Preferences -> Security & Privacy and gave permissions for the Paragon software to finish downloading. I did not have to reformat the hard drives or run any Windows disk repair processes.

Thanks all for your help, especially Old Toad!

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have same WD elements 2tb was unable to detect how Can I fix this problem as am using NTFS Asst, soft ware which I have purchased.

Regards

Devi

[Personal Information Edited by Moderator]

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.

I've bricked two Seagate external drives within 24 hours of putting a Catalina Time Machine backup onto them.

Revert your Mac to a previous macOS version - Apple

I 'd try to use ONLY Mojave's Disk Utility currently. I don't trust Catalina's yet.

I updated Mojave to Catalina and I'm having trouble with recognizing the hard drive as well as the EOS Canon Utilities...

Are there any ways of solving these issues?

Thank you!

What he’s saying is Catalina as bricked his drives. He’s probably well aware of how to reformat them mate.

It's a bloody Joke! Catalina = Vista

I too have similar issues.

Thought I'd share that what is dead under Catalina is alive & well when I connect to my wife's newer Macbook Pro but running under the old system.

Hope it helps.

How are those EHDs formatted?