External Hard Drive Missing After Big Sur Download

I've updated to Big Sur 11.1 on my MacBook Pro. When I use an external hard drive (ie Seagate 2T USB3) which I use for Time Machine backups, or any other thumb drive, they appear as an icon on my desktop but do not show up in my list on Finder. I've ensured my Finder preferences are set to display CDs, DVDs, iPods, External disks and Hard disks and they are all checked. Yet Finder does not display them. On my MacBook Air which is still running Catalina, these devices all show up as they should in Finder. The Finder settings between both macs are the same. Any help is appreciated.

RESOLUTION: I had this issue. I brought up Finder, Clicked on Networks under Locations, and my external drive name came up. I clicked on it, it showed my files, and has kept it on my Finder screen.

I think the problem is that the Mac Os does not support the NTFS format, which compatible with Windows. I had a similar problem and tried to solve the problem through the suggested solutions, including using the disk utility and running first aid, but I did not succeed. The only way left was REFORMATING the External disk! Which was not really possible!

finnaly I found the solution and easily solved the problem by installing TUXERA software. Software that can run NTFS format disks on a mac book!

it’s really exciting and this way is the easiest way to solve this problem :-)

summary: Use TUXERA software!

I appreciateI have checked everything as I think everyone else here has. This is not us. Everyone tells the same story. I have been able to get it to mount by using disk utility to see it and them it seems time machine can see it as being available.

There is no doubt this is a problem arising out of Big Sur upgrade.

We all have different disks and all are properly formatted. Erasing/reformatting the disk will not help and will only result in hours of work and losing your entire library of backups or whatever other data you store there.

It's a Big Sur-Apple problem. It is not a user generated issue. It is now February 2021 and nothing has been done to fix it.There are several threads going here and even more outside of Apple forums.

Quite surprised this is still going on. Very disappointed having to wait so long for this to be addressed and that Apple has said nothing.

A final item for any who missed my fix: Try using the utilities that came with your external drive. Open the utilities app and then plug in your drive and follow instructions. That worked with my WD MyBook, but I realize it probably isn't the solution for other drives.

That is not the answer either. You are ignoring the fact that there was no such problem until Big Sur came out. That invalidates what you are suggesting is the problem and the fix. Tuxera products are all commercial grade software packages and are not designed for individual use.

NTFS formatting is not in use by me or probably several others discussing their problem. That again indicates it is not the problem and Tuxera is not a solution. It is a MacOS problem.

With all due respect, what you suggest is not a solution and in view of the facts we are sharing here I wonder why you are suggesting it is.

Same problem here. I thought i had the problem solved alas no.

Tried mounting with diskutil and looks successful

sh-3.2# diskutil mount /dev/disk2s2

Volume KEV on /dev/disk2s2 mounted

But it gets unmounted straight away

sh-3.2# diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s2

disk2s2 was already unmounted

diskutil list shows it there.

sh-3.2# diskutil list /dev/disk2

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk2

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1

2: Apple_HFS KEV 999.9 GB disk2s2

This is a bit ridiculous. My time machine backups are there (thankfully not needed post Big Sur) but also all my photos for the last number of years are there and music among many other bits and pieces.

I am wondering what it will take for Apple to acknowledge Big Sur broke this and fix it. It would be nice to have them say they are aware of the issue and investigating. Let us know someone hears us.

I just can't imagine this is a complex fix. The issue is in talked about in five or six threads here and even more on the many non-Apple discussion boards.

FWIW this is dmesg showing the mounting process

[324962.492944]: USB device 1058110014422000 - Last CDBs 00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:157

[324962.700730]: USB device 1058110014422000 - Western Digital , My Book - detected termination of interfaceNub, currentPowerState 1, provider is non-NULL

[324962.700794]: USB device 1058110014422000 - Last CDBs 00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:000|00000000:157

[324962.701224]: disk2s2: device/channel is not attached.

[324962.701245]: disk2s2: device/channel is not attached.

[324962.701391]: USB device 1058110014422000 - fConsecutiveResetCount = 1.

[324962.701404]: disk2s2: device/channel is not attached.

[324962.701987]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.702302]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.702609]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.702954]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703000]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703107]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703210]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703306]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703309]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703395]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703484]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703571]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703655]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703739]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703823]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703907]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.703989]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704073]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704157]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704239]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704323]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704417]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704501]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704599]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704686]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704771]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704862]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.704951]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705035]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705122]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705206]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705290]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705376]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705461]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705544]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705628]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705711]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705796]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705882]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.705968]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.706052]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.706138]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.706306]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.706417]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.706526]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.706618]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.706710]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.706822]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.706918]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707007]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707095]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707182]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707273]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707447]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707638]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707756]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707766]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707833]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707882]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.707888]: jnl: disk2s2: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x6

[324962.707893]: jnl: disk2s2: end_transaction: only wrote 0 of 143872 bytes to the journal!

[324962.708030]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.708143]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.708241]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.708351]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.708750]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.709004]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.709016]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.709026]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.709036]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.709049]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.709061]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.709072]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.713369]: PMRD: assertionsUser 0x50->0x40

[324962.743106]: disk2s2: media is not present.

[324962.743229]: hfs: unmount initiated on KEV on device disk2s2

[324962.743304]: jnl: disk2s2: close: journal is invalid. aborting outstanding transactions

[324962.743639]: PMRD: PowerChangeOverride (ON_STATE->ON_STATE, f, 0x2) tag 0x22e0064

[324962.743646]: PMRD: PowerChangeDone: ON_STATE->ON_STATE

This is a major whiff by Apple.

I just got off a support chat session. Laborious trudge through write privileges, etc..

We ended up with "try an smc reset" ... and now the Seagate drive is not detected at all.

At least I used to have read access. Now will have to take this somewhere to get the data off of it.

Hard to imagine that it is not a known bug, given this thread and all the unresolved support cases.

At some level of management you (Apple) made a trade-off decision to let this ride.

Smacks of what happened with the iPhone battery/performance degradation case of a few years ago. And based on my support interaction, "they" have not even documented for their front line and second level support pros. Guess it's cheaper (in a high level sense) to pay their wages and have users annoyed than to fix this

I am sure that there is a license term that absolves Apple/Them of responsibility for damages.

But the 'gentle-persons agreement' with those of us who depend on Apple for nearly all our devices has sure been violated.

Anybody out there?

"At some level of management you (Apple) made a trade-off decision to let this ride." Agreed. How awful Apple, shame on you. Jimbocal, Have you considered uninstalling Big Sur and going back to Catalina? I have not tried my backup HDs yet. But to update to my situation: Coincidentally, moments after posting an update posted today and I installed it. Suddenly! the computer recognized my External ODD device (Roofull) which I am using to read old CDs- Word documents. At least that is solved; now onward to check my storage drives. BTW the manufacturer of the ODD has given excellent support and I reported the BigSur issue to them.

Interesting. For others I had to find my "Locations" by clicking on "my macbook" icon. Will try this if I have problem another time. Still I do not think one should have to spend so much time on such a simple thing. Apple should fix it.

Finally I have access to my external HD and this is what I did however I do NOT think the update to 11.2.1 fixed it more the restart.

Leave the hard drive plugged in (mine is in a Dell Dock)

Restart your mac

a) Get your disk number

Note that your disk number can be gotten from following command

Replace KEV with your Disk name

❯ diskutil list | grep KEV

2: Apple_HFS KEV 999.9 GB disk2s2

Run the following command from terminal

b) Mount your disk from terminal

diskutil mount /dev/disk2s2

And finally it mounted and stayed mounted

Mysterious time consuming time waste. I do not know why my new external HD reader suddenly performed after I installed the update yesterday, but I do know that it was reading on my Catalina Pro and I could not find it at all on the Air running BigSur until after the upgrade. Still this is not my backup and I haven't checked that yet.

Of course I still might uninstall BigSur. There are too many quirks in visuals and software functioning. My documents now open behind my chrome screen. My clock disappeared from top bar. `Docs in Finder end up behind the window. My minimize tab will only take the Chrome screen to the bottom of the page -- I can no longer split that screen as before. I anticipate finding more quirks as time goes on. Do not have time to look for fixes at this point I have spent over ten hours on BigSur issues.The two click spell check (control plus touchpad) is the most time consuming as I am an editor. Basta.

And so Apple finally (and secretly mind you) sent a patch overnight that automatically updated the patch. And after weeks of trying and almost giving up and sending it back to Best Buy, presto! It suddenly started recognizing the backup and every external hard drive. Once again, I didn't do anything differently, thinking I should just leave it for an hour or so and see if something happens, and yes it downloaded an external patch and updated the software. Now if Apple had listened to this community from the beginning and got the developers to update the patch, this whole thread would have never existed. As it stands lets hope that my 10 external HD's won't wear out and i lose all the info permanently from whatever is in the patch. Anyway thanks Apple, you saved me a FINAL trip to BESTBUY, and still continue to be a member of the community