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I have a multiple external hard drives (4TB Seagate, 4TB WD) that I tried to erase to APFS, but since I've installed Monterey I see that it only recognizes 1.8TB. Has there been a fix out there? I see hundreds of people with the same issue and no fix in sight.
I was suggesting that you stay away from third party drive firmware or tools, those usually make these things worse.
I believe you can remove a Time Machine drive from Time Machine without the drive being physically connected at the time (I could be wrong ...)
Have you tried, after removing all Time Machine links to the drive(s), erasing the drive at the physical device level? In Disk Utility select in View Show All Devices and erase/format at the Device level (the physical entire drive, not individual volumes or partitions). Have you tried this in Safe Mode (if not working normally)?
I was suggesting that you stay away from third party drive firmware or tools, those usually make these things worse.
I believe you can remove a Time Machine drive from Time Machine without the drive being physically connected at the time (I could be wrong ...)
Have you tried, after removing all Time Machine links to the drive(s), erasing the drive at the physical device level? In Disk Utility select in View Show All Devices and erase/format at the Device level (the physical entire drive, not individual volumes or partitions). Have you tried this in Safe Mode (if not working normally)?
Have you tried first to format/erase to GUID/HFS+? Then if that works, try erase/format to APFS?
Do you have Seagate proprietary disk software/firmware installed? That software comes with those drives, most Mac users don't make use of it since Disk Utility is the best way to manage external drives.
Have you been using the external drives as Time Machine drives? Time Machine drives must first be removed as backup destinations in Time Machine before erasing/formatting.
One of them was a time machine drive, one was not. When I tried opening it the first time since updating to Monterey it wasn't even recognizing the disk anymore but I saw it in disk utility. So I unfortunately had to try reformatting it bc Time Machine & the Mac couldn't even see it to remove the Time Machine. When I did that it recognized the drive but that's when I hit the 1.8 TB problem.
For the format to GUID/HFS+, if HFS+ you mean MacOS Journaled, then I tried that. But I still see only 1.8TB. When I click "partition" I see the 1.8TB and I see the 2.2TB as "Free Space", I get an error:
Running operation 1 of 1: Remove "Free space" ((null)) and grow "<HD name>" (disk4s2)....
The new size must be different than the existing size.: (-69743)
When I did the above in APFS, it allowed me to "remove the partition" but when I looked at the drive it was still only 1.8TB.
I'm trying the above steps right now on my WD drive. Haven't tried to get the Seagate firmware yet. Will look into that for my other drive.
I realized what you meant after I clicked send. Yes I had removed the
Ok that did it. It was the physical level that I was missing. That fixed it. Thank you so much, this was really stressing me out.
BTW I tried Safe Mode also but appears you can't open disk utility in safe mode?
Monterey won't reformat Hard Drive
