Ventura does not display external disk on Desktop or in Finder sidebar

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PhantomFrank Author

Level 1

21 points

Ventura does not display external disk on Desktop or in Finder sidebar

I have several external disks on both M1 Mini and 2017 Intel iMac.

Since upgrading to Ventura some disks no longer appear either on the Desktop or in the sidebar of Finder windows.

Finder and Desktop preferences have not changed.

Interestingly, it appears to affect only APFS volumes created under previous versions of MacOS.

Experimentation has shown that if the disks are erased and reformatted, then they are visible.

So it looks like some problem with previous versions of APFS which are not completely compatible with Ventura.

Mac mini, macOS 13.1

Posted on Nov 3, 2022 9:47 PM

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Answer 1

PhantomFrank Author

Level 1

21 points

Nov 4, 2022 6:39 PM in response to Barney-15E

All drives were being shown, but after the upgrade to Ventura all the APFS external drives were not visible in sidebar or on Desktop. As described above, any AOFS volumes created after upgrade to Ventura are visible.

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Answer 2

Tesserax

Level 10

151,911 points

Nov 3, 2022 10:12 PM in response to PhantomFrank

Hmm, try as I might, I couldn't duplicate the issue you are having. I have an assortment of external HDDs & SSDs, that were originally formatted in APFS from versions of macOS going back to High Sierra. I just went through connecting them (one-at-a-time) to my Intel Mac mini & M1 MacBook Air, and was able to access them all using the Finder.

FWIW, all of these drives already had data on them, and I did not need to erase/reformat them, to work.

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Answer 3

PhantomFrank Author

Level 1

21 points

Nov 4, 2022 12:39 AM in response to PhantomFrank

UPDATE: I have found that this affects APFS volumes created in earlier version of Mac OS (not sure how far back). Erasing and reloading the disk makes it visible. so, possibly related to a change in APFS code introduced in Ventura. I have erased and re-created several volumes and in every case they are now visible both on Desktop and in finder sidebar.

Not ideal if you have lots off data you need to reload, but it does resolve the issue.

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Answer 4

PhantomFrank Author

Level 1

21 points

Nov 4, 2022 12:41 AM in response to Tesserax

I was able to access the disks successfully via /Volumes but the disk icon would not appear on the Desktop and the disk was not listed in the Finder sidebar. They worked just fine, but did not display as icons or as locations other than going to /Volumes.

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Answer 5

Barney-15E

Level 10

116,206 points

Nov 4, 2022 5:19 AM in response to PhantomFrank

Finder and Desktop preferences have not changed.

Was the checkbox set with – or a √?

The – means not all drives are shown. If you drag them out of the sidebar, the √ will change to a – indicating not all are being shown. Just curious if it knew it wasn't showing them.

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Ventura does not display external disk on Desktop or in Finder sidebar

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