High Sierra / External HD Problems

I just finished a chat with Apple and learned that the advisors are not allowed to access Apple Community as Apple views the information here as unreliable. Amazing! They are not monitoring these boards for issues.

Doesn't seem normal. On my Late-2015 5k iMac running High Sierra I have 3 WD drives connected. One for Time Machine and two for data. I have no problem with them. I also have a portable WD drive on a 2015 MacBook running High Sierra. Also no problems.

Hopefully someone may have some insight.

I have this problem also. I have a LaCie RAID 5 drive with about 13 Terabytes of photos that will not mount or show up in disk utility after installing High Sierra. That drive now no longer shows up on a computer with a previous version of OS X. I have backup drives with all or most of the files but when I attached one, it also started acting erratically and wouldn't mount, and then it did mount once and all of the files showed, and then it wouldn't mount on my High Sierra computers (MacBook Pro and Mac Pro) or on another MacBook Pro with an older version OS X. There was never a problem with either drive before installing High Sierra

I have similar problems with High Sierra and a LaCie 5Big Thunderbolt 2 drive connected to my iMac

Initially I was unable to mount the drive but I discovered that Apple had introduced a new security mechanism in macOS High Sierra 10.13 that requires a user’s approval before loading third-party kernel extensions (KEXTs)

http://knowledge.lacie.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/007815en

Having Allowed/Approved the KEXT I was then able to see/mount the drive BUT unfortunately unable to open any of the files (in a reliable manner). Generally Finder will freeze or hang when trying to open a file

I have re-installed the LaCie Raid Manager (LRM) several times without any success. Running latest firmware

One other interesting observation is that if I boot the iMac with the LaCie RAID drive plugged into Thunderbolt - LRM hangs (and is unable to see the RAID volume) and I am unable to view/see the files in the Finder Window

However If i then disconnect/connect the drive (by unplugging the Thunderbolt cable) the files appear in the Finder Window and LRM can see the drive (but I get a spinning beach ball). Checking the Activity Window shows that LRM is NOT RESPONDING (Finder is also Not Responding)

When I click on a file on the drive to try and open it e.g Photos Library - nothing happens

If I then disconnect/Connect the drive I then get a -36 Error

"The Application Photos can not be opened -36" [ Same with iTunes etc..]

I have a call logged with LaCie - but not getting very far at the moment

My external drive has all my Photos and iTunes library - so very frustrating

I am able to connect the 5Big drive to my MacBook Pro running Sierra and access the files without a problem

I can connect a LaCie 2TB Rugged Thunderbolt drive to my iMac running High Sierra without problems

(no KEXTs required for this)

I tried this on my iMac and at the moment at least I am now able to open the Files on my drive!

(see my earlier post)

I had noticed when checking the Console Logs plenty of mdworker entries - suspect that there may be something

up with Spotlight indexing as you mention

Thanks for the hint!

This happened to me as well, and I spent hours on the phone w/support. There was nothing I could do to fix any of the drives that appeared to be going bad - on a Mac. However, I was able to recover them simply by accessing the files on a PC... then the drives started working ok again in High Sierra.

(that said, I am still troubleshooting why my computers come to an unbearably slow speed when the drives are plugged in.)

So - isn't it great when I can not post to this Apple forum using Apple's Safari for IOS? Nope, I must switch browsers and posting goes smoothly.

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Wanted to post an all-too-usual update. I opened a support ticket on this matter, whereby Appley claims this is an isolated incident, insisting it is related to an install instance of High Sierra or an incompatibility with installed software (you know, an incompatibility with High Sierra itself since that is all that has been installed on one of the desktops having the issue.)

Many questions asked, including specifics on the drives having problems.

When I suggested this a different a bug, I am told Apple has not acknowledged this as a bug.

I can’t tell you why you can’t post from Safari on iOS. I’m posting from Safari on my iPad Air 2. Others do it often. I also can’t add anything in regards to APFS on an external SSD. Works fine for me on external HDD drives and USB flash drives.

OK, so I booted in safe mode and went to disk utilities and Mac saw my external SSD and stated it was not formatted (was before so not sure what happened). I reformatted and now SSD drive works fine and not dead after all.

ruralgurl wrote:

Could all these external drive issues, & questions as to whether they tested or not, stem from the fruit wanting to push everyone to buy their cloud space rather than use external drive back up?

No.

Ok, so my drobo now works and shows up like normal.

What did I do? Got no idea!

However I noticed another High Sierra issue that may be related. Firefox had an update so I though, what the ****, I'll update. On mounting the save file to install. Finder absolutely **** the bed. Relaunch didn't work, only a reboot was an option. On rebooting, my imac would not shut down. I had to do a hold on/off button to shut it down properly. This happened 3 times before I gave up updating firefox.

How's this related? Well I googled this Finder issue and discovered a lot of people with the same problem and their cause seemed to be their computers having to reindex files after the upgrade. The more files, the longer Finder would hang. Some would be leaving their macs on overnight to find that finder eventually come out of the freeze. Mine for example now no longer freezes in Finder so I'm assuming my mac has finished indexing the file system.

Now I wonder those of us with external drive, with thousands of files are simply experiencing this reindexing freeze problem and thats why the drives are not showing up.

Thank you for the link, and that is helpful. I would be a bit concerned about loosing data on these drives for a conversion. Also think it is pretty sad to be forced to update external drives. As it stands right now, anything via usb (2.0 and 3.0) is dog slow. So I wiped one drive and reformatted to match the new file structure, and while it helped High Sierra recognize the drive itself (and not slow the Mac to .02 MPH,) working with the drive itself is so so slow, slower than Sierra. Huge differences between the new mac running HS, and an older Mini running Sierra.

Since upgrading to High Sierra every external HD I plug in freezes my MacBook Pro, it takes 10 minutes to click on something, usually ejecting is impossible, and I get the color spinning thinking wheel going over and over. I have mostly 1TB and 2TB drives, however it froze on a 64MB thumb drive. I"m using Samsung, Lacie, Toshiba, and a few other drives. I've tried turning the spotlight off, reinstalling the OS, reformatting the drives to ExFat, AFPS, or back to Extended Journaled. Most of my drives are in Extended Journaled format. The only thing that works is to just rip out the plug and take the warning ejected improperly then the computer resumes. This is the same issue in my guess profile so I know it's specific to the Mac OS software or my computer. This only started happening when I upgraded to High Sierra and am currently using version 10.13.1 (17B48).

I’ve been having the same exact issue. Spent a long time on the phone with Apple through diff calls, they continue to deny that this issue exists or that it is even in the forums.

The only thing I could do is making an OS Sierra boot drive, format the internal, reinstalling OS Sierra and use my latest Os Sierra time machine backup for a restore.

Annoying as ****!

Same issue here. I was editing photos until 3 am. It automatically did a security update to 10.13.1 and my drive I was saving to disappeared right as I was getting ready to send the files to the client and back them up to the cloud. The drive is completely gone now. I removed it from the case and tried another external case and nothing. I just plugged it in to a docking bay and when you do that anything else has to be turned off first and the bay turned back on. Now the other drive that was in the bay disappeared. This is not good. I really don't have time to edit these photos again. Now I'm spending all my time finding out why my HDD's disappeared.