External Hard Drive Missing After Big Sur Download

My WD My Book, that worked with High Sierra, no longer is workable for Time Machine after I upgraded to Big Sur. The drive has to be unlocked, and the WD Drive Unlock app appears on Finder, but when I try to unlock I get the message "You must run the WD Drive Unlock CD associated with the drive you want to unlock". Trouble is, that CD is a virtual CD contained on the drive itself. I can go to Disk Utilities and find the Virtual CD and within it the Unlock app, which shows as "mounted" with the option to "unmount", but all other options are grayed out so I can't reformat if that's the suggested solution. Unmounting and remounting doesn't help.

Unbelievable!! I just bought a brand NEW MBP and suffered the same problem, after wasting an ENTIRE day trying to figure out the same issue (I have 6 EHD) by Seagate, and they claim (rightly so) that its Apple's problem, and noticing that a lot of my software won't install on the new MBP (recognized on two other windows machines and an older MAC, Ive decided to reset the entire BRAND NEW $1500 piece of junk and send it back to Best Buy. NEVER AGAIN! will I ever buy another Mac, you proved to me once and for all that you don't deserve my loyalty, and not only that, I was planning on getting the DESKTOP PRO $6k and am now looking to get rid of my iPhone. This is unbelievable no assistance from Apple and the Geeksquad said that its a kernel issue with APPLE since 5 years ago, and they don't know how to fix it!. If i wanted an expensive surfing machine, I might as well get a Surface Book Pro, if thats all Apples products are good for, at least Windows 10 will RECOGNIZE EHDs and download software. Steve Jobs is probably shaking his head at what this company has become. Lost all credibility

Booster, sorry to hear your issues. I purchased a 2020 iMac and I'm not having any issues with external hard drives. I would agree that Apple needs to do a better job of the updates in relation to Big Sur.

As I posted on another thread, I found a workaround, at least for the WD My Book drive. Maybe the same process can be used for other drives:

Open WD Drive Utilities

A window will appear with the message "Attach a supported WD Drive". 

Attach the My Book USB cable to the computer. 

Another window will appear with the "Unlock Drive" option.

Enter the Mac user password password, then clicked on "unlock drive". 

My Book For Mac then will appear in Finder and you can use Time Machine. 

You can also eject the drive from Finder.

I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2019. My LaCie Drive worked fine with Big Sur 11 but when I updated to 11.1 it is no longer appearing. I have the External Drives Checked in preferences. Any help would be appreciated.

Irene806, First launch disk utility and does it show up in the list of drives?

Also is it possible to plug in an external power brick to LaCie drive? Do you know how the drive is formatted? ExFAT, NTFS, HFS+, or APFS?

Let us know and we can help you solve your problem.

Paul

When using the Disk Utility, it showed up as an external drive but was listed as unmounted. There is no external power supply. The lights flash on the unit and you can feel it active. (They I had to do a work item, so there was a time delay) Then a message appeared. "MacOS can't repair the disk "LaCie". You can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can't save any changes to the files on the disk. Backup up the disk and reformat it as soon as you can. "

I don't know how the unit was formatted originally, I just used as it was. Bought it in October 2019.

So I can see my files thankfully, but I need to keep them and not reformat the drive. Should I use the First Aid? Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks for your help,

Irene

Unplug the mac? really? I know coding, and its not a power issue my friend, its a kernel issue. The plug n play of MBP's with EHD's hasn't been highlighted by Apple OSX core development teams. Or if they have knowledge, they were probably under duress to implement temporary fixes until they can figure out a root fix or patch to the update.

Yeah after you install Big Sur or a new OS you have to unplug the Mac for ten seconds so that it can activate the part of it that reads external devices and is in charge of some other things. This is what the lady in customer service told me.

The other suggestions I found in these forums haven’t worked at all. Like going on Disk Utility or deleting the ‘fsck’ task process.

Unplugging is what did it for me. But his problem may be different, who knows.

From the power source. Turn it off, unplug it. Let ten seconds pass. Plug it in, and turn it on again.

Is yours an iMac or a laptop? I was mainly referring to an iMac, but I would still try the same thing with a laptop.

If by reboot you mean simply restarting or turning it off and on again, that didnt work for me. I tried both those approaches.

Maybe if you unplug the iMac for a while it lets the system know to reset something, it could be a hardware thing as well. Idk how the guys at Apple do things now. Anyways that’s all I got, I don’t know much about computers.

This isn't my first rodeo with this problem, so I already had ticked all of the settings in preferences to make the external hard drives appear prior to upgrading to Big Sur. Right now, I'm able to see my 1 TB WD Elements hard drive and access it's files, but my Seagate 4TB expansion drive will not mount when I got into Disk Utility. It's really too bad because I've been using that drive for my local Time Machine backup.

My WD My Book wouldn't unlock, either. I ended up opening the WD utilities that came with the drive (if you don't have it you can download it from the WD website), then plugging in the drive to your MacBook. A window pops up asking for your password, then you can unlock it from there.

Argh! Did you do anything at all? I can't seem to find any answers for Big Sur from Seagate.

It shows up in Disk Utility, repairs fine, but still won't show up on my desktop.

I'd rather not erase everything, since it's there ... is there any updates on what to do?

I have seven Seagate EHD's and I'm finding that the more "modern" drives (2014+) are showing up but my old 2012 "platter" 5T Expansion Desktop drive is not. Based on my read of the thread the solve would be for Seagate to make driver updates available or for Apple to do a patch in an upcoming version of Big Sur. Hopefully Big Sur 11.2;-)