Connect to one server HDD, and folders DISAPPEAR from another drive???

[Dochartaigh]

I'm on a new 2023 Mac mini M2 Pro running Ventura. My server in the garage (simple home network) is an old 2009 Mac Pro on High Sierra with both internal and external drives I connect to from the Mac mini.

When I connect to my "10TB-MAIN" drive (internal drive) on the Mac Pro I can see ALL the folders, and the folders inside those folders. BUT if I then connect to "2TB-M2" Mac Pro (external drive via USB-C) as well, then go back into 10TB-MAIN all the folders disappear! I can usually see the first set of root folders, but as soon as I go into one of those there is nothing inside. These files are actually there... but I just can't see them for some reason...

When I reboot the 2023 Mac mini, and connect to 10TB-MAIN (and ONLY that one drive) all is well again... until I once again connect to that external drive and then POOF – folders are gone yet again. Absolutely zero hits googling this and just seeing if anybody has any tips.

Note: earlier today I installed a brand new Inateck PCIe to USB 3.2 Gen 2 Card (RedComets U21, KU5211-R), and that's what the external 2TB-M2 drive is connected to. That 2TB-M2 drive is also new - I can not recall if this same weirdness happened on the old USB card or if it's just now happening for the first time...


**EDIT: Tested these, results below** Further things I want to test (which I can't test until this lengthy compile is done...):

Use a USB-C to USB-A converter on my sole USB-C drive and see if that happens through that as well.
**Same thing USB-C>USB-A on Inateck card, same thing on front Mac Pro case USB 2.0 port.

Plug the above into the stock USB 2.0 ports on the front of the Mac Pro's case and test.
**Same thing happens

See if this is because those external drives are ExFat (so I can use them on Mac AND Windows PC's)
**tried my 10TB backup external drive, formatted regular Apple AFPS or whatever it is - same thing happens on all card + front USB 2.0 ports

Test ALL of this on my laptop over wifi and see if same thing happens - note that the Mac mini was just reformatted yesterday so it really shouldn't be a fault of that install (I hope!).
**yup, happens on my 2017 Macbook 12-inch too - so it's NOT an issue with my 2023 Mac mini M2 Pro's Ventura install...

Reinstall the old slower USB card and see if this issue persists on that as well.
**didn't install the old card, but pulled the new card and then tried the stock front USB 2.0 ports and STILL happened, so it's NOT the Inateck card causing this to happen...

***On Feb 5, 2023 I reformatted (complete clean install, formatted drive and all) the 2009 Mac Pro with High Sierra and did all the updates... problem persists.

Also re-tested my old 2012 Mac mini on Mojave - that connects to the Mac Pro server and does NOT have this issue.

Also setup that 2012 Mac mini to share its internal drive and an external drive, then connected to it from the 2023 Mac mini/Ventura and it was fine as well... so seems to be an issue between Ventura and High Sierra???

 

[Dochartaigh]

Since it was my new 2023 Mac mini which I use the most which has this funky issue, and I have AppleCare on that computer... this is now escalated to the senior engineer-whoevers at Apple (everybody else I talked to there was completely stumped...).

I'll report back if there's a fix... one issue might be that I'm connecting to an ancient 2009 Mac Pro running High Sierra (I use this as the file/media server for my house), so they'll probably blame it on that and not give any help... Might have to look into a metal video card to upgrade the server to Mojave, since at first glance this issue seems to NOT happen on Mojave (just High Sierra).

 

[Dochartaigh]

(Probably) my last update on this... remember how as a test I tried those same external drives on my 2012 Mac mini which is running Mojave (NOT on my main 2009 Mac Pro running High Sierra) and it did NOT have this issue?

So I bought a $50 metal-compatible video card for the 2009 Mac Pro so I could upgrade to MOjave and get rid of this issue... and the problem still persists there lol... so I guess it's cMP specific? I give up...

 

[doobydoooby]

You are asking a lot of the old machine One thought: are the internal and external drives on your mac pro all formatted with a similar file system? I had an issue in the past where switching from one type to another caused an issue like yours on a networked drive. Macs seem to be a bit finicky when it comes to networked drives in general.

Ah no i see you tried that. Forget my comment!

 

[Velin]

One suggestion: check folder permissions. OSX folder permissions have been a problem with networked drives and OSX for more than a decade. Though I haven‘t yet upgraded to Ventura yet, so no experience with the current OS iteration.

Also, better to use the Terminal and the ls -l command. Give it a look, you want to see at least an “r,” meaning permission to read the folder from your 2023 Ventura mini. If you don’t see an “r,” or you see “- - -“ meaning no permissions, that could be a start to explain what’s going on.

And if you can’t see your folders in Terminal when you run the ls command, that’s another big clue. Perhaps you need to provide disk access in “Security and Privacy“ (a permission issue). Or as previous poster said, you may have two different partition file schemes, or file system formats, and they are not communicating. And note “scheme” and “format” are two very distinct things, either or both of which could also cause this issue.

The “scheme” problem can be a big one with flash drives, because PCs use master boot record, but OSX flash drives may use GUID or Apple partition, and can’t be read by a PC, even if the format is FAT32. This is sort of the issue you are having. I’ve seen the failure to read FAT32 many times when trading usb sticks from OSX to WIN because of the partition scheme. Drives me crazy. So, yeah, maybe you are having a similar failure, e.g. your APFS mini can’t read the older drives for a similar reason.

 

[rpmurray]

I have a 2008 Mac Pro running High Sierra and an iMac 2020 running Monterey connected to it across the network. I don't see your problem (probably because I don't have external disks attached to the mac Pro) but I have noticed that the network will spontaneously drop every so open, especially if I'm doing a long search of the Mac Pro drives from the iMac.

My suspicion is that Apple has borked file sharing in the latest releases of the macOS but doesn't deem it worthy of a fix.

 

[Dochartaigh]

You are asking a lot of the old machine One thought: are the internal and external drives on your mac pro all formatted with a similar file system? I had an issue in the past where switching from one type to another caused an issue like yours on a networked drive. Macs seem to be a bit finicky when it comes to networked drives in general.

Ah no i see you tried that. Forget my comment!

Yup, totally tried that. The problem DID creep up with ExFat system on the external drive FIRST though... but then I tried my GUID-whatever/Apple formatted external drive (which was actually INSIDE the machine before), and same thing happens. The other one, a USB drive, is native Mac formatted as well... this is just a super weird thing...

One suggestion: check folder permissions. OSX folder permissions have been a problem with networked drives and OSX for more than a decade. Though I haven‘t yet upgraded to Ventura yet, so no experience with the current OS iteration.

Also, better to use the Terminal and the ls -l command. Give it a look, you want to see at least an “r,” meaning permission to read the folder from your 2023 Ventura mini. If you don’t see an “r,” or you see “- - -“ meaning no permissions, that could be a start to explain what’s going on.

And if you can’t see your folders in Terminal when you run the ls command, that’s another big clue. Perhaps you need to provide disk access in “Security and Privacy“ (a permission issue). Or as previous poster said, you may have two different partition file schemes, or file system formats, and they are not communicating. And note “scheme” and “format” are two very distinct things, either or both of which could also cause this issue.

The “scheme” problem can be a big one with flash drives, because PCs use master boot record, but OSX flash drives may use GUID or Apple partition, and can’t be read by a PC, even if the format is FAT32. This is sort of the issue you are having. I’ve seen the failure to read FAT32 many times when trading usb sticks from OSX to WIN because of the partition scheme. Drives me crazy. So, yeah, maybe you are having a similar failure, e.g. your APFS mini can’t read the older drives for a similar reason.

So I CAN view the contents of all 6x drives normally (3x internal, 3x external) on my 2009 Mac Pro running Mojave (viewing them from my 2023 mac Mini on Ventura). I can move/copy/add/delete files to all of them (sometimes DO get an error when deleting a folder --it'll delete the contents inside but NOT the folder itself--, but it's not often and a reboot fixes it)... so I assume I DO have proper permissions for the most part... just can't be on an external drive formatted Mac OR ExFat (which ExFat has NO way to save permissions google tells me fyi) at the same time and still view internal drives.

On the INTERNAL drives when I run ls -l from my Ventura computer I get "drwxrwxr-x@" as the permissions for every folder. On the EXTERNAL (which I tested with the old internal Mac formatted drive which is now in an external enclosure -didn't test the ExFat M.2 2TB external since that can't save permissions it seems), that one says "drwxrwxrwx" as the permissions - and as soon as I access that external drive, the internal drive disappears.

(one thing I'll note, just in case, is when the internal disappears - remember how I said that I can STILL see the root folders of the internal drive? But just not anything inside them? I tried doing ls -l then dragging in one of those root folders into Terminal so I could hit "return" and see what Terminal said... could NOT drag it into Terminal which was super weird...).


Also, a couple days ago I DID re-do permissions... at least I think I did. On each drive I hit Command+I, unlocked the info panel, went to sharing and permissions clicked my name (which is the shared iCloud username AND my login name for each of these two computers) which was already set to "Read & Write", then went to Gear > Apply to Enclosed items. I then rebooted everything and tried again - SAME thing happens. After that failed test, I then went one step further and did "ignore ownership of this volume", rebooted, same thing as always...


Since I also think this might have something to do with permissions I've been contemplating a last-ditch effort of using the Disk Warrior 5 program our mac consultant used to use (in dire times only) to re-do permissions - like hard re-encoding EVERY SINGLE FILE I think is how he explained it... but he always told me to NEVER use this without him and I don't want to screw up things even more (I literally have EVERY file I've ever created since 1993 or so, do NOT want to screw things up...although I do have everything backed up in triplicate + cloud lol... but even if I re-copy it over I fear the permissions will still be screwed up from the backup too...).

I have a 2008 Mac Pro running High Sierra and an iMac 2020 running Monterey connected to it across the network. I don't see your problem (probably because I don't have external disks attached to the mac Pro) but I have noticed that the network will spontaneously drop every so open, especially if I'm doing a long search of the Mac Pro drives from the iMac.

My suspicion is that Apple has borked file sharing in the latest releases of the macOS but doesn't deem it worthy of a fix.

My network connection is pretty solid tbh. But yes, I also think Apple just doesn't care about computers on newer OS's being able to access files on an older one TBH. Maybe for the first time ever I'll try one of those open-whatever hacked OS's on my Mac Pro... I DO have an extra SSD I can pop in for the test (then switch back to the original if it doesn't work...). *edit, actually, OpenCore seems a bit too much for me so probably not lol

 

[rpmurray]

Maybe for the first time ever I'll try one of those open-whatever hacked OS's on my Mac Pro... I DO have an extra SSD I can pop in for the test (then switch back to the original if it doesn't work...). *edit, actually, OpenCore seems a bit too much for me so probably not lol

Instead of OpenCore you should try the OpenCore Legacy Patcher. It determines the best settings for your rig and then installs, doing all the legwork for you. Very easy to do.

Mr Macintosh has a lot of videos on YouTube showing the process.

 

[Velin]

I get drwxrwxr-x@" as the permissions for every folder. … On the EXTERNAL … that one says "drwxrwxrwx" as the permissions - and as soon as I access that external drive, the internal drive disappears.

This one is really confounding, then, because the permissions look wide open, especially the read. You should be able to see them.

The one remaining question, then, is whether the ExFat drive is using a master boot record partition, versus GUID or Apple partition. And if not using master boot record on the ExFat drive, well, I don’t think it’s your files.

Let us know if you figure this one out. Because these issues absolutely do come up when networking OSX/Macs, even today.

 

[Dochartaigh]

The one remaining question, then, is whether the ExFat drive is using a master boot record partition, versus GUID or Apple partition. And if not using master boot record on the ExFat drive, well, I don’t think it’s your files.

Let us know if you figure this one out. Because these issues absolutely do come up when networking OSX/Macs, even today.

This doesn't only happen on the ExFat drive (which is GUID btw), but on multiple other external drives as well (formatted mac). Also doesn't matter which USB ports I use (stock front or rear, add-on USB 3 cards, USB 3 card pulled, whatever).

Already formatted the HDD and reinstalled the OS from scratch too (on the Ventura mac mini computer connecting to it as well!)... it's either some funky hardware issue of this particular/exact Mac Pro, or is a macOS compatibility issue which only seems to effect Mac Pro's (as my mac mini, the one time I tried it, was fine). Apple's engineers also seem to not have a clue... (started a ticket on this a while ago since I have AppleCare on the new Mac mini).