Sonoma crashing LaCie hard drives

I updated my Mac ultra m1 to Sonoma and have had nothing but external hard drive failures. After updating both of my LaCie drives would not mount, I was able to repair one and got it to mount. But then a day later the drive failed to mount again and repairing it did not work with disk utilities. I have two LaCie 2big 40tb raid drives. I’ve since reformatted them, I wiped my Mac Studio clean and did a fresh install of Sonoma. Drives worked fine for couple days then again had one of the LaCie drives not mount, repairing would not work. I did not have any issues before upgrading to Sonoma. I’ve been using these drives for a year without problems. Anyone else experiencing corrupted hard drives when using with Sonoma?

Mac Studio, macOS 14.0

Posted on Oct 8, 2023 8:43 PM

Top-ranking reply

emmyluty22

Level 1

35 points

Posted on Dec 2, 2023 2:28 PM

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!

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20 replies

MRYFLYGUY

Level 2

231 points

Dec 2, 2023 2:44 PM in response to emmyluty22

“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. “

I did basically the same thing on Ventura. This is probably why I didn’t have a problem with Sonoma. My 3d copy (also on a WD Passport) lives in my drawer as a doomsday recovery, updated periodically. Glad it worked out.

MRYFLYGUY

Level 2

231 points

Oct 9, 2023 7:50 AM in response to dzubot

Are you external drives formatted in APFS?

dzubot Author

Level 1

16 points

Oct 9, 2023 8:12 AM in response to MRYFLYGUY

Good idea. However I have reformatted both as Mac OS ext and they are working fine for now. Will try them for a week or so and see if they stop working again. Will report in a bit. It's a good thing I had all my projects backed up on another drive so I did not lose anything, could have been extremely bad for my company if this had happened before backing up data. The reason I use raid drives is to not have failures like this. Reason I upgraded the Mac Studio to Sonoma is because Laid raid manager would not work on the latest Ventura OS. I have MacBook Air m1 with early version of Ventura which Lacie raid manager works on. The Mac Studio would not rebuild cache for Lacie raid manager to work, so I upgraded to Sonoma and rebuilt the cache as Lacie raid manager requires, worked no problem on Sonoma.

dzubot Author

Level 1

16 points

Oct 9, 2023 7:52 AM in response to MRYFLYGUY

Mac OS extended (journaled)

noonerd

Level 1

8 points

Dec 15, 2023 11:24 AM in response to emmyluty22

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

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Sonoma crashing LaCie hard drives