With Monterey update, can't see certain hard drives

I can also confirm that using the apple branded usb-c to usb-c (the one used to charge the ipad or macbooks) work to access my external drives. But to clarify, to this not all cords are created equal mantra in the comments. This is true, not all cords are created equal, only the apple-branded usb-s charging cables work, not the much faster apple-branded Thunderbolt 3 cables. They do not work. They are the ones used for fast data transfer (probably like the ones that come with your external drives, non-branded) they are noticeably thicker than the charging cords. Looks like we are going to suffer slower data transfer rates until apple resolves this major issue.

For what it's worth I can confirm that the official apple USB c to USB c cable trick worked for my friend and his hard drive. He had a G-Drive 0G10347-1 which is a G-Drive Mobile USB C 4TB space gray drive. He is running Monterey 12.0.1. The minute he replaced the cable that came with the hard drive with his laptop charging cable the drive mounted fine. UNBELIEVABLE!!!

I have a 2015 iMac. upgraded from Mojave to Catalina. My 10T G-drive would not show up after the update. I wanted to rule out the cables so I took the "Apple" Thunderbolt cable (Male on both ends) and the "Apple" adapter cable female Thunderbolt to USB-C to the Apple store. They checked the cables and the cable were working perfectly. 3 days later after exhausting everything and pulling out my hair, I bought a Belkin USB-A to USB-C cable (plugged the it into the non-Thunderbolt USB-C port on the G-drive and voila the drive now shows up on my iMac. There is something about the update that renders the Thunderbolt option unusable. I thought the hard drive was toast but it was only a stupid cable glitch. Apple should be looking at this problem and letting people know. So glad I didn't end up spending money on data recovery.

I recently upgraded my Monterey to 12.3.1.

Immediately out of my three external hard drives, one of them can't be recognised any more.

After spending hours with the Apple support team on the phone, there is no quick solution apart from trying my hard drive on other people's Mac.

Lucky I found this forum here after the phone call.

By switching the USB3.0 USB-B to USB-A cable to an old USB2.0 USB-B to USB-A one, the hard drive came back to life.

Even thought the speed is unbearable with USB2.0 (as that is the spare one I have at the moment.) but I am happy for knowing there is nothing wrong with the hard drive and my files are safe. I will now need to rush to get a new USB3.0 USB-B to USB-C cable and hope it can work with the current OS. I also tested my current USB3.0 cable on other PC and there is nothing wrong with it.

I am surprised the Apple support team didn't mention anything about the OS upgrading issue has caused it.

• Boot in Recovery Mode
• Open Disk Utility from there (not the same as Disk Utility running under standard boot!)
• Here you should see your drives.
• Run Disk First Aid on each volume that was not booting
• Restart

Worked for me on two separate external drives. Hope it works for others, too.

What is the exact model of the laptop? You can get this information by clicking the Apple menu and selecting "About This Mac".

What file system is on those drives?

If you are using the manufacturer's proprietary software to manage those drives, then that software may not be compatible with Monterey. See if the drive manufacturer has an updated version of their app and if there is no update, then you will need to wait until the drive manufacturer updates their app for use with Monterey.

Within Disk Utility click on "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility. See if the physical drives appears when you connect the problematic G-drives. If the physical drives appear, then the drives are being seen, but it is a file system or partition issue.

Also make sure to connect the drives directly to the laptop without any hubs, docks, or adapters (unless the adapter is necessary to convert the USB-C to USB-A) since these items can sometimes cause problems. If the drive is connected directly to the laptop, then sometimes using a powered USB3 hub from a respected manufacturer can help alleviate drive problems.

Are the external drive encrypted?

Try rebooting the laptop since Finder & Disk Utility can get into a persistent weird and confused state at times if something unexpected happens and only a reboot will resolve the problem (at least until the event is triggered again).

Try a PRAM Reset and it never hurts to do an SMC Reset (follow the instructions for the T2 Mac).

Try accessing these drives while booted into Safe Mode.

Check to see which chipset your various G-Drives use by checking in the System Profiler (under Storage, or USB, or Thunderbolt -- not sure which is best). You can access the System Profiler by Option-clicking the Apple menu and selecting the first item (the Option key toggles the first item on the menu and perhaps other menu items). Maybe Monterey has a problem with certain USB chipsets used in external drives. I know Big Sur and/or M1 Macs had these types of compatibility issues last year as there were lots of posts here on these forums, but I've never really seen any in-depth article or analysis of the issue except that the JMicron USB chipset was fingered to have problems -- perhaps some other ones as well.

Use the Terminal app to try to manually mount the external drive to see if it may provide an actual error message. You will need to correct drive identifier for the volume on the external drive. You can get this by using Disk Utility. Using your screenshot as an example the drive identifier is "disk2s2", you must verify the drive identifier each time you mount the drive because the identifier will likely change. Here is the sample command where I use a generic drive identifier of "diskX" so make sure to replace "diskX" in my example with the correct drive identifier such as "disk2s2":

diskutil  mount readOnly  diskX

If this fails, then it may be interesting to see the output of the following command when run from Monterey and from the other MBPro where the drives are working. It is best to disconnect all other external drives so that only the information about the G-Drive is displayed.

diskutil  list  external

Is the data on these G-Drives backed up somewhere else? You should always have frequent & regular backups of the computer as well as any external media which contains important & unique data.

HWTech wrote:

Use the Terminal app to try to manually mount the external drive to see if it may provide an actual error message. You will need to correct drive identifier for the volume on the external drive. You can get this by using Disk Utility. Using your screenshot as an example the drive identifier is "disk2s2", you must verify the drive identifier each time you mount the drive because the identifier will likely change. Here is the sample command where I use a generic drive identifier of "diskX" so make sure to replace "diskX" in my example with the correct drive identifier such as "disk2s2":

diskutil mount readOnly diskX

Oops, the command I suggested for mounting the volume is slightly incomplete as I forgot to include the "s2" part of the identifier which tells the command to mount the APFS volume such as "Nassau 22". The command should look like the following example, but replace the "X" in "diskXs2" with the proper identifier (at the time the screenshot was taken it would be "disk2s2".

diskutil  mount readOnly  diskXs2

If the drive identifier is "disk2s2" as shown in the screenshot, the command becomes:

diskutil  mount readOnly  disk2s2

Note to @TheLittles and @Dogcow-Moof, I suggested the command line method of mounting as it is more likely to produce an error message if the mounting process fails plus the command is mounting the volume as Read-Only which should make it more likely for the command to work in case there is a file system issue. I've found recent versions of Disk Utility may not even give an error message and may just silently fail making the user wonder if the "mount" button even activated.

FYI. In the spirit of not giving up I disconnected a wacom tablet from the computer, mostly because I don't use it and I was trying to simplify my desktop, I had shut the computer down...and magically when I rebooted the mac everything was back in its right place, all my hard drives lined up where they should be....so very happy about that! The wacom was connected via a hub. I had actually plugged a small disk into the hub to see if that would work and it did show up, too, but the reason seemed to be the wacom tablet being plugged into the hub. Just an FYI for something else to try...I'm fixed and happy!

viathelens wrote:

FYI. In the spirit of not giving up I disconnected a wacom tablet from the computer, mostly because I don't use it and I was trying to simplify my desktop, I had shut the computer down...and magically when I rebooted the mac everything was back in its right place, all my hard drives lined up where they should be....so very happy about that! The wacom was connected via a hub. I had actually plugged a small disk into the hub to see if that would work and it did show up, too, but the reason seemed to be the wacom tablet being plugged into the hub. Just an FYI for something else to try...I'm fixed and happy!

Good detective work! Many times it is just something extremely simple. One of the most basic troubleshooting steps is to disconnect all external devices because it only takes one device to interfere with all the other devices.

You should see if connecting the Wacom directly to the Mac has the same effect on your drives. Maybe the issue only occurs when using the hub with the Wacom. If you share the hub with the drives as well as the Wacom, then try connecting the Wacom to a different port on the laptop instead of sharing the drives on the same hub. A hub with UASP support is best to use when connecting drives (drives should also support UASP) and other slower USB devices. Perhaps you will need to wait until Wacom provides updated drivers for Monterey. You should check with Wacom (tech support or forums) to see if this is a known issue.

UASP:

https://www.startech.com/en-us/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-uasp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Attached_SCSI

After hours of frustration, I found your post and sure enough, my G-Drive AmorATD drive works fine with the Apple USB-C to USB-C cable. Stranger still, I have two of these drives and one of them works fine with the original cable, the other doesn't show up on the desktop and can't be mounted, yet works fine with the Apple cable. Both drives worked fine in all versions of OS 11, so there seems to be a Monterey problem with some USB-C drives...

I upgraded to Monterey and had the same issues. I am working with a seagate backup hub and my computer is Mac Pro. I upgraded my ntfs software and through that I was able to finally mount my drive. I tried different cords, software, etc and nothing worked. I upgraded my NTFS for mac software and was able to mount through that. I hope this helps someone.

https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/ntfs-mac/

Hello All.

I have an additional solution that might help a few, if your situation is like mine.

I recently updated my 2018 MacMini 8.1 to Monterey about a month ago.

I have 2 extender hubs attached to the standard 2 USB ports, monitors attached thru the usb-c ports.

In the extender hubs I have several devices, and usually plug in 2 - 4 usb drives at any given time as needed.

My external USB devices could be seen and appear on the desktop since then and all was fine.

Today I plug in one of my usb drives and its a no show. I try a different port on the hub, no luck. I try a different USB device, same. I restarted, ran utility, etc... all the standards. Nothing.

Frustrated, I disconnected all the devices AND the hubs themselves and plugged everything back in.... BOOM! Everything shows up.

Wanting to verify what happened, I unplugged the hubs and restarted.

The startup was quicker and, on a separate issue I've been having and hearing about, Bluetooth started immediately and was not slow to initialize like it had been, so my mouse and trackpad were immediately available.

I plugged the hubs in with my external usb drives connected and they came up onto the desktop, no problem.

Conclusion: to me, the issue seems to be in the number of devices connected, especially if running Monterey on an older Mac like mine that does not have the M1 chip.

I'm hoping I don't have to unplug/replug all the time, but at least I know where to start with a solution.

Hope this helps.

THANK YOU for following up. I was having the same issue -- Upgraded to Monterey and no hard drives were visible. I unplugged my Wacom tablet and restarted my machine. All drives are showing up, now.