Ventura 13.6 destroyed 2 USB-C flash drives - Does anyone know how to fix it?

Question

Ventura 13.6 destroyed 2 USB-C flash drives - Does anyone know how to fix it?

IMPORTANT NOTES:

Each flash drive is 1TB
I tried one drive in 13.3, the 2nd in 13.6
I tried each one in an older Mac with El Capitan and they're not appearing there either after Ventura's shenanigans

About a week ago I plugged the first 1TB USB-C flash drive into my 2019 MacBook Pro (Intel) running Mac OS Ventura 13.3. It recognized the drive, identified it, and allowed me to start downloading something to it. Unfortunately, my computer went to sleep and, without my doing anything, ejected my drive and said it was "improperly ejected". I read where Ventura was doing this so I upgraded to 13.6 and tried again with a 2nd USB-C flash drive. I had already removed the "sleep" ability from both my screen and hard disk (IE: I'm on power so it won't go to sleep during the entirety of the download, which was taking a long time). IT DID IT AGAIN! I don't know what happened but I walked away and it "improperly ejected" the USB drive. I was able to get the 2nd one recognized again and tried reformatting it as exFAT but it still improperly ejected it again.

Now, my computer won't recognize EITHER of these flash drives, nor will my older El Capitan system recognize the drives. I'm incredibly frustrated because that's 2TB and $50 worth of flash drives that this stupid OS Ventura just boinked. I don't even want to plug in my Time Machine external drive for fear that I lose it and all its data, too!

BEFORE ANYONE POSTS THE GENERIC "IF A USB DEVICE DOESN'T WORK WITH MAC" INFORMATION:

Yes, I've tried restarting the laptop 4 times - 2x with the USB still connected, 2x taking it out and plugging it back in
Yes, I've booted the computer in Safe Mode and tried getting the computer to recognize it
I've already run first aid on my internal hard drive, no dice
I've tried both the thunderbolt ports on the actual computer, plus the 2 USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 port on an external USB-C-attached hub
I updated my software (see above) including the OS
I checked the USB device on my 2011 MacBook Pro running El Capitan 10.11.6 - nothing appeared.
I checked to ensure that everything is checked to show my external drives in Finder
BOTH USB-C flash drives appear in System Information under my USB hardware information but they DON'T appear in Finder or in Disk Utility (confirmed with both USB drives AND on the El Cap machine)
I've tried stopping the FSCK process (as recommended by one of the many attempts at troubleshooting this issue) - nothing

I am so exhausted by this and don't want my stupid operating system to boink yet another external hard drive! It's STUPID that I've just wasted 2TB worth of data space and don't know how to get it back.

Update:

Because Apple's system still shows my 2011 as primary, here's my current laptop's information:

13-inch "2017" (the tech who replaced my keyboard said it's actually a 2019) MacBook Pro

2 Thunderbolt-3 ports/USB-C

8GB RAM

Ventura 13.6.1

Intel 2.3 Ghz Dual-Core Intel i5

MacBook Pro 13″

Posted on Nov 14, 2023 7:47 AM

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Answer 1

KiltedTim

Level 10

236,718 points

Nov 14, 2023 8:00 AM in response to bleedingrose19

Are both of these drives “new”, or have they been in use for a while?

There has been a rash of bogus large capacity USB flash drives for sale on Amazon and elsewhere. These pretty much always turn out to be small capacity drives that have been hacked to appear much much larger than they are.

Where, exactly, did you get the drives?

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Answer 2

Nov 14, 2023 12:44 PM in response to bleedingrose19

If something causes the partition or file system to become corrupt, then Disk Utility may have trouble recognizing the drive so you can erase it again. Disk Utility is a terrible app, but that is what we must deal with.

It also does not help that Apple tries to hide functionality from the user to make things simpler, but it really just makes things more complicated & confusing. Within Disk Utility click "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility. You can try running First Aid on the hidden Container and the physical drive. Or you can select the physical drive to erase. However, sometimes the partition or file system gets into a state where even this may be impossible with Disk Utility. If that is the case, then you either need to delete all partitions using a Windows system, or by writing zeroes to the beginning of the drive to destroy the partition table, but this requires using the command line. macOS 10.12 or earlier do not have the "View" option & is not needed since they always display the physical drives & Containers.

The only way to prevent an fsck from interfering with mounting a volume is by using the command line to manually mount the volume in read-only mode.

Are these USB sticks (aka thumb drives), USB SSD drives, or USB Hard Drives? I don't think Prolific is the manufacturer of the "flash" drive since it appears they make IC chips, but rather the manufacturer of the chipset in the controller of the device/adapter.

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Answer 3

Nov 14, 2023 8:15 AM in response to KiltedTim

The first one, the one that 13.3 destroyed, was in use on this laptop prior to it being ejected. I was repurposing it from data to a rather large download, and that's when it improperly ejected it. The 2nd one is identical to the first, and it was brand new never used. I bought them both at the same time.

Yeah I'm usually wary of "too good to be true" price-wise items on Amazon and elsewhere, but these were working just fine before 13.3 ejected the first one. I'd never had an issue prior to that. I bought them both on Amazon after doing a substantial amount of research, reading reviews, and doing independent searches aside from reviews (because those can be bought).

Edit: because it shows the Vendor/Manufacturer information in System Information, both of these drives are from Prolific Technology, Inc.

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Answer 4

Nov 14, 2023 9:43 AM in response to bleedingrose19

Another update because I wondered if it was the Thunderbolt/USB-C port: it's not. I plugged my phone in with a USB-C cable and it's recognizing it just fine.

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Ventura 13.6 destroyed 2 USB-C flash drives - Does anyone know how to fix it?

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