Do I have to get my external drives approved when upgrading to Ventura?
Do I have to get my external drives approved when upgrading to Ventura? In addition, if I have an external drive that is partitioned, does each partition have to be approved?
Question marked as
Approved? There is no approval process other than whether those drives are recognizable as supported drives, or in a valid connected enclosure, and do not require installation of vendor device drivers. I would unmount all externally mounted drives during a Ventura upgrade process, and afterwards, mount the drives one at a time to verify that they appear on the Desktop and their contents are accessible.
Do not use a prior operating system Time Machine backup drive in Ventura. Start with a newly formatted APFS drive of 2.5 - 3x the internal startup drive capacity.
If you are upgrading to Ventura from macOS Mojave or earlier, then it is wise to confirm that your printer/scanner vendor still provides drivers for Ventura, and that third-party applications are confirmed to be 64-bit, or the vendor has 64-bit versions compatible with Ventura. It might even be wise to use the free Go64 application in the presence of the earlier operating systems to verify which applications are 32-bit.