Disk Utility keeps asking for a password every time I go to open it. And it asks for a password for every drive attached to the system.

Disk Utility seems to not be working correctly on a number of my drives, is there some piece of code that could have been corrupted? And if so, can it be corrected?

Running a Mac Pro with 14 drives (not including the internal SSD), 12 of them are doing this. When I open up Disk Utility it asks for a password. I have to enter and re-enter that password for each and every drive that is connected before it is clear and able to function. There are 8 NVMe drives seated on a Sonnettech M.2 8x4 Silent Gen4 PCIe card that is in turn seated inside the Mac Pro. There are another 4 NVMe 4 TB NVMe drives seated on internal PCIe slots with the OWC Accelsior 1M2. And finally there are 2 SATA drive inside the Promise Pegasus J2i inside the computer. Only 2 of the NVMe drives seated on the OWC Accelsior cards work perfectly. It seems like every other card makes the Disk Utility act strangely. I have trouble shot the set up by installing and removing drive one at a time as well as putting the working drives into different internal PCIe slots and the problem follows the drives. I have also cloned the drives (using SuperDuper) to external SSDs and run those over thunderbolt and the issue persists, even on these external drives. And I made sure to erase everything on the drives before cloning so whatever has made these drives malfunction, travels with the copy.

One other thing, I took the Sonnetech card out and installed it into a Sonnettech Echo I external expansion interface and attached that to the computer via thunderbolt. And it asked for the password there as well.

And to be clear, the drives function perfectly except for this odd interaction with Disk Utility.

I spent many hours on my own, swapping drives in and out, moving things around, and this is the result. I also spent many hours on the phone with senior Apple technicians and we tried everything. They mostly wanted me to upgrade to Tahoe but like I said, when I remove the offending drives, Disk Utility functions perfectly. And the internal SSD does not seem to be affected.

I cannot erase the drives because even thought they are all backed up, the offending code travels with the data.

This all began when I went to create a disk image off of a DVD and was unable to open Disk Utility. The DVD was hung off of a USB connection via and external DVD player. I had not installed anything new, no new software, not new applications, nothing. This is my work computer so I am very careful with my interaction with the internet.

The DVD player is no longer connected.

Anyone have any idea what this might be and how I can try to address this?

Thanks.