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Why doesn't my external hard drive work with Catalina?

I just bought a new Mac Mini with OS Catalina on it and my 10 year old Buffalo 2.0 brand external hard drive won't work with it. It would work with OS Mojave. My 2018 vintage Seagate external hard drive works with Catalina.


Overall, I haven't been impressed by Catalina. Hopefully Apple will have upgrade fixes soon regarding to Catalina's bugs.

Posted on Jan 4, 2020 1:48 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 4, 2020 5:49 AM

I'm not sure how we'd know that, but here are some possibilities.

The Buffalo hard drive requires some software to work with the Mac and it is not compatible with Catalina. An external drive shouldn't require any additional software to make it work. If it does, you will likely have problems every time there is an OS update.


The cable is bad.


The drive is bad.

3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 4, 2020 5:49 AM in response to Charles Swaim

I'm not sure how we'd know that, but here are some possibilities.

The Buffalo hard drive requires some software to work with the Mac and it is not compatible with Catalina. An external drive shouldn't require any additional software to make it work. If it does, you will likely have problems every time there is an OS update.


The cable is bad.


The drive is bad.

Why doesn't my external hard drive work with Catalina?

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