USB External Drive not mounting after macOS Sequoia 15.0 installation

[loby]

Has anyone had issues with external drives and mounting or corruption after updating to macOS Sequoia 15.0?

I have a 18 TB Western Digital Elements drive that will not mount. When running diskUtil and first aid etc. it says corruption. I thought maybe it was just "bad luck", but when I ran recover app(s), it looks like all the files are there and recoverable, but in macOS, the APFS file system (as per Apple's diskUtil) says it has some corruption, but not clear what... I tried mounting on other older OS's on other Macs (after macOS Sequoia), but with no luck, as something happened possibly with first accessing macOS Sequoia.

Interesting...with SoftRAID, I am able to see the drive, but will not mount. It is a spinning hard drive, so when I use the command in the app to mount the drive, it spins up, the light flashes, but will not mount. But...when I try verifying the drive, it can scan the drive and the files are accessible in the verify command, even after scanning the sectors (files) no errors, but still...no mounting or no access.

I purchased for $156 EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard app (after looking through various apps - expensive "Yes") and it recognizes ALL of the files, but it is taking two days to go through all of my 18 TB worth of files etc. No choice..I need the files, so I had to pay to recover this time...

Is anyone else having these type of issues? I have read around the internet that there are issues (especially with taking longer than usual to mount USB drives), but has anyone had mounting issues like this or is it just maybe my luck this time...

Does macOS 15.1 beta fix this issues?

Thanks!

 

[Fishrrman]

What FORMAT was this drive in?
APFS ?
Or... HFS+ ?

What was it used for?
Backups?
Or something else?

Was anything on it backed up to another drive?

I never trusted "big" drives like this.
Too many eggs in one basket -- especially if you don't have a backup.

You DO have ANOTHER drive that can serve as "the target" for the recovered files, right? I don't think you'll be able to "save them back" to the same drive. (I could be wrong)

IF the data recovery app can "get them back" (you didn't tell us how full the drive is), considering that there are A LOT of files, then the price you paid isn't bad at all.
YOU GOT THE DATA BACK.
That's what counts.

A professional data recovery firm might charge $1,000, $2,000, or more for such a job.

Some more thoughts:
For PLATTER-BASED drives, DON'T USE APFS.
Use HFS+ instead.
AFPS can lead to badly-fragmented platter-based drives, and can also lead to "disk thrashing".

Having said that, there are a few cases where you have to use APFS on a platter-based drive:
- If it's a boot drive (but the most recent versions of the OS seem not to want to boot on slower HDDs)
- If it's a backup drive created with either time machine or CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.

If you can get the data back (again, it should be saved to another drive), I suggest that you take the problem drive and:
- Erase it to HFS+ (mac OS extended, journaling enabled, GUID partition format)
- Run disk utility's "first aid" feature on it. If you get a "good report"...
- REPEAT the "first aid" process five times. Do you get a good report every time?
Then I'd use the drive again. But keep it backed up, too...!

 

[loby]

What FORMAT was this drive in?
APFS ?
Or... HFS+ ?

What was it used for?
Backups?
Or something else?

Was anything on it backed up to another drive?

I never trusted "big" drives like this.
Too many eggs in one basket -- especially if you don't have a backup.

You DO have ANOTHER drive that can serve as "the target" for the recovered files, right? I don't think you'll be able to "save them back" to the same drive. (I could be wrong)

IF the data recovery app can "get them back" (you didn't tell us how full the drive is), considering that there are A LOT of files, then the price you paid isn't bad at all.
YOU GOT THE DATA BACK.
That's what counts.

A professional data recovery firm might charge $1,000, $2,000, or more for such a job.

Some more thoughts:
For PLATTER-BASED drives, DON'T USE APFS.
Use HFS+ instead.
AFPS can lead to badly-fragmented platter-based drives, and can also lead to "disk thrashing".

Having said that, there are a few cases where you have to use APFS on a platter-based drive:
- If it's a boot drive (but the most recent versions of the OS seem not to want to boot on slower HDDs)
- If it's a backup drive created with either time machine or CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.

If you can get the data back (again, it should be saved to another drive), I suggest that you take the problem drive and:
- Erase it to HFS+ (mac OS extended, journaling enabled, GUID partition format)
- Run disk utility's "first aid" feature on it. If you get a "good report"...
- REPEAT the "first aid" process five times. Do you get a good report every time?
Then I'd use the drive again. But keep it backed up, too...!

1. I was an idiot that listen to various internet articles about APFS drive used on plater drives (HDD). I "usually" format to HFS+ as in the past it was said that APFS is "just" for use with SDDs. I read "now-a-days" APFS works well with HDDs and not just SSDs with the newer macOS', so I decided to take the plung and try. It "seem" to work well (or better) for about a year now..but this happened.

2. I "usually" don't put all of my important files on one drive, as I am old school and would put files spread out over a few smaller size drives and do backups of the files on other drives (just in case). I have not had any issues for a few years...so I got careless...and thought technology is now better so I do not have to take all the time with disk management. I "just" recently copied all of my files to the one drive to clean up the older smaller drives and planned to go through all of the files on the one larger drive and copy them to a bunch of 4TB drives after deleting duplicates and going through to delete or keep etc. I was ALWAYS weary about larger drives (my 18TB) and thought "if" that drives goes out, I am screwed...but I forgot about my plan (got busy) and did not go through the files on the 18TB drive and do a proper disk management (timing) I got hit.

3. The drive has around 10-12TB of my projects and files, so I agree that it was worth paying the $150 for the app to get my files recovered. It took literally two full days non-stop to just scan the drive to discover the files. It looks like I will be able to recover most of the files. I am putting the files back on the 4TB drives again during recovery. Thought searching for my files on one drive would be more convenient and easier to do instead of speeding out my files on 4-5TB externals... but my timing (forgot) to transfer the files was off and I got hit.

4. Will not ever format a platter spinning drive to APFS format ever again!

5. Drive is used to store project files. I just copy the file over to the drive after completion of a project. So, again it was probably worth the money for the app to retrieve the files. Some the files are backed up on other drives, but it will take forever to find which drive has what files, so I will do a better disk-file management job going forward after this issue.

6. I will put the files on smaller 4TB drives during recovery instead of putting all of them on the 18TB drive.

I will do what you said as a recommendation. Thank you for taking the time to write out clear instructions!

 

[Fishrrman]

Once you get the recovered data back onto the smaller drives, you might re-format the large drive, and copy stuff back over to it -- just as "another copy someplace".

I would even consider partitioning the large drive into perhaps 4 "pieces", with each respective partition representing one of the smaller drives...