M2 MacBook Air not detecting older external hard drive

Try the devices without the dock. If the direct connects work, suspect the dock is either broken or not fully compatible.

mapple1 wrote:

Thanks, I should have said also that I just switched this week from a 2017 MacBook Pro running the same OS to the M2 MacBook Air. Both the external hard drive and printer worked fine through the dock on the 2017 MacBook. The printer isn't recognized by the M2 when connected directly through a USB/Thunderbolt adapter either.

With the printer, the issue may be the need for new drivers, and/or the failure of your printer's manufacturer to provide them.

I just switched from a Mac running High Sierra to one running Ventura. I have a Canon all-in-one printer that's served me very well. Canon didn't bother to provide printer or scanner drivers that worked with Ventura. So I configured the device as an AirPrint printer, and bought VueScan Standard ($50) to replace Canon's scanner software. So far, so good; although I don't know if AirPrint has controls for all of the features the old driver did.

Ditch the dock and try direct connections to eliminate the dock as the problem.

Is the hard drive by any chance formatted using HFS, rather than HFS+ or APFS? I’ve read elsewhere in these forums that current versions of macOS will not read plain HFS.

if that’s it, you might have to use a Mac running an older version of macOS to rescue the data by copying the contents of the HFS-formatted drive to a HFS+-formatted drive.