External Hard Drive Missing After Big Sur Download

ttppee -

I believe the NTFS issue and a solve has been addressed in this thread, which I just checked and see is now 13 :( pages long. Apple is not listening. The thread starts out back in Nov. as a decent and hopeful (trusting actually) question to Apple support. Now months later it is a stream of reported issues, disappointment and anger. Because: Apple DOES NOT CARE!! Surprised they haven't purged this thread. Go back and read through.

georgiosh - My thoughts exactly. This is known and being ignored. Surprised tech writers are not on the story.

I too want to submit a written complaint. How does one do so? Everyone who has posted here should do so.

My time machine drive can't be seen since big sur. I have tried everything that has been mentioned. Hours and hours of restarting machine, etc. It is seen fine on my older mac book air. This one was fine until big sur.

Help

I remember the days when a Mac could read any hard drive format and you certainly would not need to jump through your own butt to get it to work. That was one of the things we used to wave in the face of the PC lovers. Steve Jobs must be rolling in his grave.

So now if we can get our external drives to be recognized we have to. say goodbye to our backed up data? I'm not sure even Microsoft would say such a thing. I have not tried it but I'm guessing it is impossible to roll back to an earlier Mac OS that actually worked?

Hey Apple any plans to fix this problem? Do I need to start telling friends and family they might as well buy a Windows machine?

if you have a iPad Pro with usb-c or the lightning usb camera kit (even better) you can connect to the drive and see if it shows up, once it does it will then work again with your CPU (iMac MacBook etc).

This is a part of Big Sur's design been non compatible with older OS, older drivers etc.

Thor62 wrote:

I remember the days when a Mac could read any hard drive format and you certainly would not need to jump through your own butt to get it to work.

Do I need to start telling friends and family they might as well buy a Windows machine?

If your friends and family can't afford the latest Apple devices then yes because apple care won't cover it.

If you live outside the US Apple is obliged to repair any issues caused by an update or upgrade (especially in th EU), but dont be surprised if your told it was your cats fault and you need to replace a battery or something.

GavrielTech wrote:

"If your friends and family can't afford the latest Apple devices then yes because apple care won't cover it.

If you live outside the US Apple is obliged to repair any issues caused by an update or upgrade (especially in th EU), but dont be surprised if your told it was your cats fault and you need to replace a battery or something."

Epiphany response: Ha! They won't even ANSWER US to blame the cat. It is pure negligence disrespect and hubris. So insulting. The EU is correct in forcing such laws. No time to look at Reddit but this MUST be a discussion everywhere.

well I solved my drive issues with Catalina by restoring the original system that came with my computer, then worked my way back to Big Sur., this took 30-40 PRAM restarts just to get the restore to kick in.

The last BigSur update just ruined this and I should mention that its very hard to restore when your drives vanish internally and externally., especially internally, cause when they do the wifi won't work as normal which means you can't restore, you can't even from a usb stick., you have to reset the PRAM with a battery disconnected.

GavrielTech

tnx much for posting for history's sake :) Yeah for me this is way advanced tech. I am a simple scholar/writer/researcher. My needs are pretty basic. That Apple would fail in such a major way as to affect my pretty paltry needs is unspeakable and as I have said elsewhere morally and business model bankrupt.. and now to ignore the problem. ???? Well i see no further need of this sexy Mac machine. Again tnx for posting a solution, Forums has disabled my ability to respond with a simple "helpful" and I wonder why??/

Epiphany-uc wrote:

GavrielTech

Forums has disabled my ability to respond with a simple "helpful" and I wonder why??/

You need to ask Apple about that, its a serious responsibility when Apple File System (APFS) is a proprietary file system,

My method is just one way I learned from others, there may be more unknown methods.

Hey there!

This is a long thread, so I haven’t read it all.

However, I’ve found that ANY time, I start to use an external hard drive with a Mac, I make SURE it’s formatted in a way that will always be able to read/write to/from. Although I definitely know software and hardware fails at times, which, to me I expect, despite which brand of computer you have, so routinely keep a few backups, as external hard drives can hole a lot of storage while remaining fairly affordable.

Formatting your external hard drive from the get go should, (but isn’t guaranteed to), keep your data safe. Which is why if I start backing up a new Mac, I check the formatting, storage, etc.

In each case, I start the formatting in Disk Utility, on the new OS’ make sure to select on the top menu: View > Show All Devices. Then select the TOP level of your external hard drive, then select the Erase tab:

When I plan to user a drive solely for Mac, I format as so:

Name:

—Give it a name.

Format:

—Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or APFS if necessary.

Partition Map:

—GUID.

If I plan on using the external hard drive for both Mac AND Windows OS’, erase the same way using:

Name:

—Give it a name.

Format:

—ExFAT.

Partition Map:

—Master Boot Record.

This should assure you that you won’t have problems reading from/writing to, these drives. Although formats change every now and then. And likewise external hard drives do fail or get corrupted and need to be erased. (As internal). Which is why it’s best practice to have a backup of a backup.

Hard drives do have a life span, so unfortunately they are not the fountain of life. However are readily available for decent prices, and do come in handy. Likewise cloud services are another option, (iCloud, Dropbox, One Drive, etc. etc.). However, even data stored in a cloud service should be backed up elsewhere, as servers do fail, no matter the company. Likewise, data gets corrupted, for a number of reasons, e.g. the account is constantly attempting to upload, or a device is attempting to download more data that it can handle or has room for. (One example).

Hope this helps someone, otherwise, best of luck, everyone here is here to help.

Guys, Don’t waste your time here, Apple just simply stop support NTSF format in purpose when you upgrade to Big Sur, No way you can find a way to make it work, Unless someone in Apple have conscience, finds that he has done something wrong...,.But I guess it won’t be happen.....

Another Me Too. When I upgraded from Catalina to Big Sur, Finder no longer shows USB external drives.

I get some drives inevitably from Windows users, and so the disks are formatted with MS DOS/FAT.

The good news is that (1) Disk utility does show the drive, but more importantly, (2) I was able to find

the drive by going to Finder -> Go -> GoToFolder and typing "/Volumes". The FAT formatted USB drive

is located there and can be explored using Finder.

The big annoyance factor is that Finder is hot showing external drives on the left panel. I have "external

drives" set in Finder->Preferences (General Tab) and in Finder->Preferences->Side Panel. You can of course

drag and drop your USB drive to the side panel on Finder. And then it will show up, finally.

No hard disks, let alone External Drives, at all are showing in Finder, including the Macintosh Drive. While

everything is checked via Preferences, the side panel shows only Favorites, the iCloud Drive, and a list of

Tags.

Baffled that Finder default view usefulness has been diminished.

@ T1Nvan--You say "didn't realize" well this is not on US! It's on Apple to let us know what we need to do to make our OS function as it ought to function! You are a generous soul! And thanks for the tips!

T1Nvan --

Got it. Looked at locations on my sidebar - Thing is mine has alway been set to display. I still could not see the drive or get it to mount.

What I did: I installed whatever most recent WD packages I found - this gadget when activated shows all my

external drives. My Passport and my other drive are both WD, but the app even shows my other smaller thumb drives when they are mounted.

I did this against the advice of an advanced user on this thread - it was the only thing that worked. He had advised that

this software interfered with certain Apple processes, but I had no choice.

Thanks again- Epiphany-uc