With Monterey update, can't see certain hard drives

In a strange twist, 5 of my 6 drives work fine. The last drive worked when I swapped the Sandisk/G-Drive cable for the Apple USB-C cable, but today, it's not recognizing that drive again, and it also causes the computer to refuse to shut down/restart if the drive is plugged in. I know another person mentioned slow restarts because of the drive issue. My 24" M1 iMac restarts in about 10 seconds normally. With the one USB-C drive that isn't recognized plugged in, it refuses to shut down or restart... Just another mystery...

Hi Hamsong, welcome to the "frustrated" club! When I plug my G Drive in, I too have the same problem - if it just does happen to see one of the partitioned drives which is EXTREMELY RARE, it then won't release or allow me to shut down - I have to force it which nobody likes to do at the best of times. For goodness sake Apple, where is the update to sort this out??? I'm fed up of my Mac telling me off that I haven't backed my files up for XX number of days!

Hi Hamsong, Jagbird1

I wouldn't hold your breath - sounds complicated to me, and nobody is admitting any kind of responsibility (I suspect it's both). I'd be surprised if we see a fix this year (unfortunately). It's a royal pain in the neck as I was planning a complete reorganisation of images (which I can't access!)

Chin Up!

Hi Jono, so I guess if what you say is true, Apple are going to see a queue of people requesting a refund for their G Drives that are not fit for purpose! I will be at the head of that queue!! But as you said in an earlier post, what the devil do you get as a replacement?? Has anyone on here got a new / newish external drive that does work???

Hi Jagbird

as you say - what do you get instead? How to know what does work?

My suspicion is that the drive manufacturers started using a new USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 interface which they tested with Big Sur, but which actually contained some kind of shortcut / inconsistency / non compliance which didn't matter . . .and then Apple tightened things up with Monterey in one of the last betas before it was released (which is why it wasn't picked up in earlier betas).

Likewise. I'm a photographer with 8 G-Drives. 6 of them are old 2TB and 4TB drives. The two new ones are 5TB and co-branded by SanDisk, though the drives have a big "G" on them. ONE of the new drives works fine with the existing cable, one does not.

It's a reasonable theory. Problem for me now is I need specific images for a client, and as luck would have it, they are only on the 1 drive of 8 that I can't access. Sometimes it works with Apple USB-C cord, sometimes not. With both the stock AND Apple USB-C cord, it's accessible via drive data recovery software, so I guess that's how I'm getting my photos off of it until it mounts properly...

Buying an apple dongle is not a solution, it's a broken by design fault. USB-C/Thunderbolt3 is supposed to be a standard. This fault has locked me out of my 3D printer, my recording studio audio interface, my Zoom L-12 portable studio and every single external drive or card I I own. I have trusted Apple for 37 years, not anymore. This is worse than Microsoft in the Zune era.

Yeah, Apple broke 3rd party dongles. Build expensive computers with insufficient interfaces, then breaks compatibility with third party solutions. Accident or deliberate, I don't care. It's unprofessional. This Mac is THE most expensive Mac I have owned and the most expensive Mac I have used since 1984 and I don't appreciate being locked out of my creative tools because Apple can't support a dongle this month that they happily supported last year. This may well be my last ever Mac and, if this fault isn't fixed by christmas, I may even offload it and go Debian or Ubuntu. I paid AU$3900 for this maxed out M1 Air last year, I expected better of Apple and I am feeling sorely ripped off today.

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

Jono Slack wrote:

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.

No, the problem is, to turn up in the beta process, one of the beta testers needs to have the hardware configuration that is failing.

As I stated, I have a variety of drives, none of which have an issue connecting to my Mac running macOS Monterey.

Other people have mentioned they have two models of a drive, one made in 2019 and one made in 2020 and the 2020 drive has issues, which seems to point to an issue with certain hardware interface chips.

I understand what you're saying, but there are so many thousands of people involved in the Beta process (probably hundreds of thousands in the public betas) . it seems really unlikely that nobody had a piece of kit which was a problem. Which is why I suspect it might be a last minute issue.

On the other hand I would agree that it's probably the fault of a hardware interface chip - but I still think that Apple will make it work again (after all it worked with these devices in Big Sur).

But I also suspect that lots of people have problems and haven't noticed - I have two SSDs (San Disk but different models) they both 'work' but they're really really slow, and they are not new.

All the best

Unfortunately I have contacted Apple Support directly. They spent a considerable amount of time with me. They said that it was beyond them so they said they would pass on the notes and were confident a fix would be coming soon. The Apple rep said he could see many people were having the same issue. Unfortunately, because I had all of my work documents on an external drive (and not on the cloud as I should have, I know!) I had to seek a recovery service, on my dime, and am still waiting for it! Frustrated indeed!!

liliafromfullerton wrote:

Unfortunately, because I had all of my work documents on an external drive (and not on the cloud as I should have, I know!) I had to seek a recovery service, on my dime, and am still waiting for it! Frustrated indeed!!

FYI, you could have performed a clean install of macOS Big Sur by first erasing the drive before re-installing macOS and restoring from a backup made before the upgrade to Monterey. Your external drive would now work and your files would be accessible. No extra cost except the time involved.

If you wouldn't want to revert the internal drive, another option would be to purchase another external drive and install macOS Big Sur to the new external drive. While it is awkward having to boot from an external drive, it is the least disruptive option until Apple fixes the issue. At most this option costs the price of one USB3 drive which you can later re-purpose later on.

The "cloud" has its own risks as well. The data stored in the cloud can become inaccessible for a number of reasons plus the data stored in the cloud is always at risk from attackers and the whims of the cloud storage provider changing the rules.

You should always have frequent and regular backups of your computer and all external media which contains important & unique data.

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.