Sonoma crashing LaCie hard drives

All is not lost! Same thing happened to me for exFAT external drives on my Mac in Sonoma. Three things you can try:

I have read when people mount the drive to Windows, then select to it do a repair in Windows, then when you plug drive back into Mac it works. This this. Some say the drive will mount on Mac but then has problems again....so maybe quickly make backup on APFS formatted drive.

What worked for me: I used recovery software EaseUS. Could now see inside the drive, even though couldn't be mounted. The software then scans drive (took 10 hours to scan 10 TB) and you can see your files. I was able to recover all my video clips. Transferred them to new drive formatted in APFS...and works well in that. EaseUS cost about $100 for one month but well worth it.

And yet another thing you could do is find a Mac that's still in Ventura. I bet your drives will mount, and then you can copy them to an AFPS formatted drive, then go back and erase/reformat your original exFAT drives to APFS, and you should be fine using the original drives again. I recommend you try this or connecting to Windows PC first, and use EaseUS as the final resort (as costs money and takes a lot of time.)

Now I'm starting to make 3 copies of all my active client projects. Every night making copies on 2 other drives...which can be the cheap WD Passport. I've also gone through all my old external drives and reformatted to APFS.

Feel free to ask me more. I've done shoots in Africa so I I feel for what happened to you on your flight home!

MacOS ext was implicated in my problem with my Time Machine and Media external USB drives when I installed Ventura (uses APFS). Support had me reformat as APFS and they worked as expected. Since you have 0 of 2 working now, you might try formatting in APFS and see how that works. At least it will match the MacOS drive and take formatting out of the problem equation.

Have you checked the firmware and is it current/certified with Sonoma? The latest info I see online references High Sierra which is eons ago. APFS might be your solution.

"Will Ease software work on a drive that does not mount?"

Yes! Worked like a miracle. EaseUS could see inside my unmounted drive. They have a demo/trial version you can use for free. I bought it after a test. Like $100 for one month use. Does take a long time to scan the drive... 10 hours for my 10 TB drive. But I could at last see into it and copy files to another drive. Recovered nearly everything. You do have to really dig through the scanned files, isn't like seeing the original drive...keep looking. Have now been formatting drives in APFS.

Upgrade from Ventura to Sonoma has been a DISASTER. Rolling back to Ventura has also been a disaster. LaCie D2 series drives had intermittent failures to mount. LaCie Bg 2 Dock failed to mount all of its partitions. 2 trips to the local Genius Bars and many calls with 3 different Senior Support advisors has actually put me backwards. Attempts to contact Apple CEO Tim Cook at his public email address and via fax to his office have not had a response. This has been going on for about 3 weeks. Yesterday a Senior Support Advisor refused me any further help unless I upgraded from Ventura 13.6 to 13.6.1. I though that was unreasonable. Mac has lost its shine for me. I can only wonder what its like with Brand X.

MikeBrambo wrote:

I so wish I had read this before I committed 3 weeks work to 2 separate HDD's as back ups whilst on a field shoot in Africa, they gave up on the flight home. The folders can be seen but not accessed. Formatted as ExFAT.

Hopefully, you can recover those files. Are you using iCloud for backups? There have been numerous formatting issues as you can see on this forum starting with the latest versions of Ventura. I had to rebuild my user profile after having issue with one of the latter updates in Ventura so my 2 external HDD are fine in Sonoma.

Moving forward, my new SOP for installing a major update is to back up, erase/reformat the Mac HD in APFS and then do a clean MacOS install. I really think this is the key minimizing update problems.

I understand. If you're using 2 drives, I assume you're using a RAID 0 configuration with no redundancy. As such, I assume you have complete backups of both drives to restore from. If it continues to be problematic, I'd highly recommend you try APFS (and a third drive for some RAID redundancy). Are the LaCie drives certified for Ventura?

ive had 2 Lecie 5t external drives crash since updating to sonoma. One has cost $2k to get the data recovered lasted 24 hrs and the new drive crashed again. 3 external drives all crashed since updating to sonoma. The amount of work that’s been lost is unbearable. Not to mention the 2 weeks I’ve had to wait for the drive to be recovered then to lose it all again. I’m devastated. Will be reporting to apple support.

I so wish I had read this before I committed 3 weeks work to 2 separate HDD's as back ups whilst on a field shoot in Africa, they gave up on the flight home. The folders can be seen but not accessed. Formatted as ExFAT.