Drive issues after macOS 13.2 update

After 13.2, my 2 USB-attached Western digital drives will not mount, a SanDisk flash drive will not mount, and my Pioneer BD drive will not mount. However, drives that are in my 2 QNAP TR-004 enclosures do mount. They do not show up in Disk Utility, but they are seen on the USB bus(es) via System Information. If I boot into safe mode, all drives will mount.

I'm having success mounting my OWC Ministack (though the SSD never fails to mount) by either running a fresh install of Ventura 13.2(only mounts after the first start) or now just unplugging and re-plugging the Thunderbolt cable on the back of the Ministack. Neither Safe Mode or any other" supposed fix" showing up online right now seemed to work for me. Joshua (tech) at OWC is very aware of the problem and we've been conversing for days. Originally I was going to return the Ministack (thinking that was the problem) until following these forum postings, I found that external drives of every ilk were experiencing this problem with Ventura 13.2

I fixed all the hard drives by removing jmPeripheralDevice.kext from Extensions folder. This did not fix the Pioneer BD drive. The 13.2.1 update today fixed that.

Thanks Klahane!

I've been having problems accessing my Lacie 2big DOCK 16GB drive. Been storing backups on it and when I plug it in (after installing Ventura) it did not show up in Finder. NTFS Paragon and Disk utility recognised that there was a drive connected to my Macbook pro M1 MAX, and the drive was spinning up.

I searched all over to see if it was something wrong with my Mac, almost delivered the drive to a technician as the Lacie disk is the only disk I have that didn't work. Luckily I found your post and followed the restart in Safe Mode steps. The drive showed up in Safe Mode, I restarted the Mac in normal mode, and now the disk works fine!

Thanks for your help. Hope Apple can find a solution to this problem.

ps. I was running Ventura 13.2.1, and still had the problem

Ventura 13.2.1 Update helps.

really sorry to hear ...

unfortunately for me, after trying a dozen or so things, I reverted back to macOS 12. external drives now mount via USB-C or external dock connections.

I have an intel mbp 16. when I was on 13.2, plugging in a drive I noticed something strange - the drive name showed up in one of the USB items listed in System Information (in the USB section). but really lost about getting it to appear anywhere else on macOS.

a shame, for all those needing their external drives to do their work and having this function broken after a software update. this type of thing is nothing new. and I always did not like jumping on the latest the instant it comes out - for this reason.

unfortunately, for me it took a complete wipe of my Mac, then installing macOS 12 from a USB installer (booting into recovery). and even more sadly for me my time machine backups were on the external drive that did not want to connect and one of my troubleshooting choices was to wipe it clean. but I would not have done that if I didn't have 2 duplicates of my backups and personal data elsewhere on my network.

end result is that I am just about doing a fresh/clean install and adding back my docs/apps/settings all manually.

but I intend to stay on Monterey for a while, probably will not bother with any newer macOS for my mbp.

if you have a tm backup on one of your external drives, and you cannot wait for the developer to figure it out and push a mac update ... maybe you might want to do the same as I did and then restore from the tm backup.

I really would have wished for an application or software suite that can take a verbatim picture of my mac's SSD - exactly - and back it up. some open source apps used to be available that could do that like clonezilla. but the state of newer OS's and encryptions built-in are making solutions like that impossible to offer to users.

I just installed Montery from scratch and everything is working again, all HD's show up all, all SD card readers work again all USB Thumb drives are recognised again.

well done apple the update to 13.2 cost me so far 3 days of work

only issue I have is my Photos Library is no longer recognised as it's not backwards compatible :-(

i have an external SSD, which i use connected to an OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock. it used to mount fine with 2 partitions on it (apfs TM, EXFAT). that doesn't work anymore and i think the last time it did, it was before my update to 13.2.

i've tried accessing from Safe Boot, and the TM partition appears, mounts, etc. however the EXFAT does not (it is Ghosted in diskutility). rebooted back to normal, neither partition will mount. they will not even appear in diskutility.

i tried connecting the external SSD directly to the mbp's thunderbolt ports, as well as via the OWC dock but not working. have also tried using another user account on my mac, and have also tried resetting NVRAM (twice).

the last thing i decided to do is completely wipe the SSD (in safe boot) and make a single APFS partition on it first, then add another partition (tried EXFAT, then tried MSDOS). they do not mount in safe boot.

had to lose my TM backup stored on the SSD to try this, but reformatting the drive it appears did not do anything but reveal that 13.2 has issues.

is Apple aware of this ? i've seen numerous posts doing a google search, as well as in this community - many unresolved/unanswered.

Apple "Engineers" suggested it's an issue with a drive in the Promise (despite all drives showing up and promise utility and system diagnostics test shows they are all good)

So I still have a M1 MacBook Pro on 13.1 installed Promise Driver, and Promise works as expected, so definitely a 13.2 issue not a Promise issue. It's quite incredible that Apple pretty much has no way to downgrade a system, yet they release purely tested system updates that render a big part of my set-up unusable.

I documented this on film; now I will update the MacBook to 13.2 and would think the same issue will occur again.

I managed to get a terminal command to download Ventura 13.1 as it's otherwise not publicly available to users

Here is the Terminal command to create a macOS 13.1 installer in the Applications folder: sudo softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 13.1

Not for the first time Apple f%$# this up nicely so far three days of work and deadlines missed because of this BS