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Mathiaje Author

Level 1

4 points

Folders on external hard drive not showing

The hard disk is mounted and is visible in finder, however the folders on the disk are not visible. The disk shows up in disk utilities just fine. I Have tried different cables (both power and usb), first aid in disk utilities and lots of restarts with no luck. This started happening after the latest update to OS Ventura.

When I plug the disk in my colleagues mac pro (same exact machine, but with Big Sur 11.7) it works just fine. If i make a empty folder from my mac, it show up for a brief second, then disappears. Same folder show up when connected to other macs. In other words, the disk is connected with read and write permission, the content just doesn't show up.

Seems like a OS Ventura bug..

Details:

Mac pro:

3,2 GHz 16-cores Intel Xeon W

AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB

96 GB 2933 MHz DDR4

OS Ventura 13.0.1

Hard disk:

Seagate Expansion HDD 12TB

ExFAT

Mac Pro

Posted on Nov 30, 2022 1:49 AM

Best reply

Matti Haveri

Level 6

14,724 points

Posted on Nov 30, 2022 2:10 AM

Where was the exFAT volume formatted? Is it GUID or MBR partition scheme?

macOS might be picky about exFAT specifics do usually it is best to format it on the Mac although in my experience the default Windows format should also work. I am not certain about GUID vs MBR. I presumed GUID should be preferred (formatted on macOS 12 Monterey) but with it only a small portion of 128 GB flash drive was recognized on Windows 10 while with MBR all space was seen also in Windows 10.

Notice that some Apple's apps (Photos, FCP, Compressor etc) don't work well or at all on non-Mac formats so use APFS (SSD) or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) (HDD) and use FAT, exFAT or NTFS only for sharing a cross-platform volume. And stick to the Disk Utility and uninstall any 3rd party disk software unless you really need it.

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Folders on external hard drive not showing

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