macOS update killed my external HD(??)

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Level 1

4 points

macOS update killed my external HD(??)

A few days ago my mom installed the Ventura 13.4 (22F66) update on her M1 iMac. Afterwards she was unable to open a Finder window–it just gave her the spinning color wheel forever. I noticed that her external hard drive was not mounted even though it was plugged in. As soon as I unplugged the hard drive, the Finder started working normally. When I plugged it back in, the Finder froze again and the disk never mounted. Disk Utility similarly does not acknowledge the drive and freezes whenever it's plugged in.

It's a Toshiba 4TB spinny hard drive with two partitions, one for Time Machine and one for media storage, connected via USB C. I don't remember how it was formatted. It was working fine until this last macOS update. Did the update break my mom's hard drive?? Any ideas on how to salvage the data? I've never had a hard drive this badly broken and I have no idea how it happened...

Two other things that may or may not be relevant:

After the update, my mom got a message that the computer was being "optimized" and performance may be affected.
My dad mentioned that in the past the iMac had told him to unplug peripherals before installing an update, and he thought maybe my mom should've done that. But I've never had to do that and it's not obvious to me why it would be necessary... (although I might start doing it now out of fear...)

Any help would be much appreciated!

Edit: I've tried plugging the drive into other computers, and using Disk Utility in recovery mode. Same result.

iMac (M1, 2021)

Posted on Jun 5, 2023 11:09 AM

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Answer 1

boonstra Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 5, 2023 6:11 PM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks for the replies. I doubt it was NTFS but I guess I can’t rule it out.

And it is USB-powered. Maybe it would be worth a try to take it out of the enclosure and use a SATA to USB adapter? Since that would have a separate power supply

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,846 points

Jun 5, 2023 3:24 PM in response to boonstra

One other idea. Is it bus powered or does it have its own power supply? If bus powered, it might not be getting enough power to fully spin up.

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Answer 3

Jun 7, 2023 11:14 AM in response to boonstra

It doesn't take much for macOS to not be able to mount a drive since macOS doesn't deal well with anything unexpected.

Salvage what data? The TM backup or the media storage? Unless you can get Disk Utility to run First Aid on the drive, I doubt there is much you can do for the TM backup. The best option would be to boot into Recovery Mode, then connect the Toshiba drive. If it locks the system up, then the only other thing to try would be connecting the drive to an older Mac running an older version of macOS to see if it can be used to run First Aid on it (depends on the version of the file system on the Toshiba drive whether an older OS can repair the file system on the Toshiba).

At best to try re-using the drive, you can try connect the Toshiba to a Windows PC to delete the partitions, then see whether Disk Utility on macOS can be used to properly erase the drive for use on macOS. If you have a Windows PC, then you could then check the health of the Toshiba drive by running the portable version of GSmartControl and posting the complete text report here.

FYI, I never recommend mixing a backup drive with a data drive because you put your backups at higher risk of being damaged when you really need them. Plus the data on the other partition needs to be backed up somewhere else if it is important....so you are already dealing with other external media. Best to have two separate drives from the start.

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