External hard drives don't mount under sonoma

I have just upgraded to Sonoma on a 2023 Silicon Mac Mini and all my USB-A have stopped mounting or are not reliably mounting. These are encrypted APFS drives.

None were there at first; they don't show up in Disk Utility either so I can't mount them there.

I followed a hint here - https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/sonoma-wont-mount-external-drives.2404856/ - and tried recovery mode. In recovery mode they are greyed out but can be mounted using disk utility. But then on a normal reboot they disappear again, usually (as I speak I have a Time Machine drive that has remained visible on reboot but another is missing)

Extremely frustrated that such a fundamental bug is in this OS.

Posted on Sep 27, 2023 4:44 AM

Top-ranking reply

mistersquid

Level 3

809 points

Posted on Dec 16, 2023 4:23 PM

not_apple_genius wrote:

[...]

I had a similar issue [...] I was seeing a pop-up come show and disappear so fast that I had to screen-record and slow it down to see what it was. [...]

[...] System Preferences > Privacy & Security > Allow accessories and changed [...] to connect to "Automatically When Unlocked". Connected my adapter again and voila, it shows up.

Hope this helps.

Nice tip!

Was also sometimes seeing the same disappearing dialog when connecting external drives. My "workaround" was both suboptimal and embarrassing (reconnect device with cursor positioned just so for a split-second click).

Hopefully ppl will see and follow your recommendation.

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61 replies

jjd33872

Level 1

8 points

Oct 16, 2023 4:36 PM in response to sterow

I am also experiencing this problem with four external Thunderbolt drives formatted as APFS. Automatic mounting does not function. Deleting the encrypted drive password in Keychain Access, re-connecting the drives, and entering the password when prompted results in the password dialog hanging, remaining on top of all other windows indefinitely. Mounting via the command line works, but I am concerned about the integrity of two of the disks which are RAID 1, so I do not write to them.

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External hard drives don't mount under sonoma