With Monterey update, can't see certain hard drives

Hi There

Here's my information about affected (and unaffected) gear

Macbook Pro 14" M1 Pro late 2021

Affected G-Drive mobile USB-C 5TB (2021)

Unaffected drive G-Drive mobile USB-C 4TB - this one is seen and is functional (2018)

I've also swapped many different USB-C cables - and swapped between the 3 ports on the MBP

I've also tried the drive attached to a USB hub on a Benq monitor - again, it doesn't work

However attaching either drive to the USB-2 Hub on an Apple Thunderbolt display and they both work

So - I think it's more likely to be the age of the drive than the capacity -

I hope they fix it soon!

Like most of these things it's likely to be half of one and half of the other (G_Drive controller slightly out of spec and Apple firmware also). The difficulty is if they both blame each other and nothing happens!

I'm tempted to send my drive back as well (because it's a pain), but I need to replace it first to get the data off!

All the best

Hi there Stephen

I'm quite convinced this was accidental (they really are going to have to fix it). It's nothing to do with the M chip, but with Monterey (it also affects older computers running Monterey).

I agree it's unprofessional - what confuses me is that if it came up in the betas surely they would have fixed it, my suspicion is that it was something which got broken by mistake just before the final release.

I feel your frustration though, I'm pretty frustrated as well.

But as Dogcow-Moof so wisely says - go to Apple support in case they don't know about your particular devices.

Good Luck (to as all)

best wishes

Jono

I can't believe this still hasn't been fixed yet. So many of us are sitting on perfectly fine drives that are no longer usable due to a bug. How many hours did we all spend running tests and pulling our hair out over what turned out to be an OS-level issue beyond our control? It seems that certain chipsets in certain external drives just don't play well with 12.0.1, while others work perfectly. I'll just be sitting here waiting on the fix.

eddieart@yahoo.com wrote:

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.

Nope. Not a solution, but glad it worked for you.

Just upgraded to 12.1 and this bug hit me too on my 2018 Intel MacMini. When I was on 12.01, everything worked fine. But right after I upgrade yesterday, my external TB3 enclosure disconnects a few minutes post-boot and refuses to reconnect. I have an XPG NVMe SSD in a Fledging Shell enclosure. My regular platter based drives work with no issues. Tried various TB cables including Apple's. No dice.

Firmware version is 1715.60.5.0.0 (iBridge: 19.16.10647.0.0,0).

Hello ALL, Apple did not fix the external hard drive issues in the new update for iMac. I have 2 G-Tech drives that will not copy files or folders larger then about a gig without getting a "cant not read or write" message. I also have to unplug and plug in my wacom tablet to get the hard drives to show up as if there is an issue with all my usb ports. If the wacom tablet is unplugged at the startup the drive will show up correctly, but sill have coping issues every time. I did a test on a laptop with the previous OS and had no issues at all. Worked like it did for years. THE NEW OS UPDATES DO NOT WORK CORRECTLY. THIS IS PROOF.

Not a cable issue. It's the faulty USB-C ports which do not support the said cables.

Hmm, it seems like the 12.1 update did fix the issue for some certain drives but not others. Mine is still not working with MacOS 12, but works perfectly fine on every other system I mount it on.

Same issue here, none of my drives are mounting and/or disconnect and connect sporadically. Going to try reformatting an empty drive see if that fixes things. But fairly unacceptable that these computers would ship with a bug like this – none of my other macs have any issues, just for some reason this one?

None of my machines have any issues with external drives, so the next task is to figure out what’s different here.

People have been testing with these releases for months now, so if it was an obvious bug it would have been found and squashed by now.

But the bane of any computer maker’s existence is that this may be the first time your particular combination has been tried, and it may yet be an issue with your device.

The key is to be methodical about sorting it out.

Safe mode shuts off third party kernel extensions, so removing the tablet didn’t load the Wacom driver.

Make sure you have Wacom’s latest driver installed:

Driver 6.3.44-2 (macOS 10.13 - 12) - 113 MB 10/12/2021 4:44:00 PM

I have the same issue with my G-Drive. Worked just fine before Monterey, after Monterey it will not connect. Everything disconnected, tried mounting in Disk Utility and just get an error. Still searching the web for solutions and nothing so far.