Sonoma won't mount external drives

[netnothing]

I have a OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad with four 4 TB HDD in it connected to my M1 Mac Studio. All drives encrypted. Since Sonoma, none will mount. Even from disk utility they won't mount. I removed the stored password in Keychain and when I go to mount it just hangs after I enter the password.

I can move the enclosure to my MacBook Pro (Intel) on Montery and they mount fine.

Anyone experience anything similar?

 

[bob_stan]

I have an OWC Thunderbay Flex 8 and 2 Thunderbay 4 drives and they are all mounting fine so far.

 

[netnothing]

I have an OWC Thunderbay Flex 8 and 2 Thunderbay 4 drives and they are all mounting fine so far.

Thanks. I setup a new user and the drives mounted after entering the encrypted password.

For some reason on my user account, it hangs.

I removed the entries from Keychain, but nothing working. I also don't see a repair keychain option anymore?

 

[bob_stan]

Sorry I missed the fact that yours were encrypted. Mine are not.

 

[fisherking]

my encrypted externals (both seagate) mount without issue with my imac (and have been there thru all the betas as well)...

 

[netnothing]

There is clearly something wrong with my user account, but I don't know where to start to troubleshoot.

I reset my keychain, but that hasn't helped.

I removed the drive and am using an external dock. No difference, so it's not the OWC.

Disk Utility sees the drive, but when I go to mount it, not it doesn't even prompt for a password.

Any ideas on next steps?

When I try to run First Aid on the disk, Disk Utility just hangs on Unlocking Disk. It never even asks for the password right now.

I keep thinking something is wrong with my user account and Keychain. For example, even though I reset the keychain, I can't even unlock the System Keychain - it just hangs.

 

[fisherking]

There is clearly something wrong with my user account, but I don't know where to start to troubleshoot.

I reset my keychain, but that hasn't helped.

I removed the drive and am using an external dock. No difference, so it's not the OWC.

Disk Utility sees the drive, but when I go to mount it, not it doesn't even prompt for a password.

Any ideas on next steps?

When I try to run First Aid on the disk, Disk Utility just hangs on Unlocking Disk. It never even asks for the password right now.

how is the disk formatted? & in Finder>Settings>General, is 'show these items on the desktop' checked for external drives?

 

[netnothing]

how is the disk formatted? & in Finder>Settings>General, is 'show these items on the desktop' checked for external drives?

Disks are formatted both as AFPS and HFS+

So far on my other user account, all disks mount fine, so this is something on my main user account, I just have no idea where to look.

This only happened after the Sonoma update.

 

[TonyJByrne]

I updated this evening and immediately hit this issue with two external drives, both encrypted.

Here’s how I solved it.

1) Reboot Sonoma into recovery mode and select the Disk Utility from the options provided.

2) Mount each disk, providing the the filevault passphrase.

3) Reboot. The drives should now mount cleanly.

I updated two machines and the first one asked me to sign into iCloud. The second one didn’t and that’s the one where I had the issue with the disks. I also couldn’t check the iCloud settings for the same machine.

 

[fisherking]

I updated this evening and immediately hit this issue with two external drives, both encrypted.

Here’s how I solved it.

1) Reboot Sonoma into recovery mode and select the Disk Utility from the options provided.

2) Mount each disk, providing the the filevault passphrase.

3) Reboot. The drives should now mount cleanly.

I updated two machines and the first one asked me to sign into iCloud. The second one didn’t and that’s the one where I had the issue with the disks. I also couldn’t check the iCloud settings for the same machine.

i never had to do any such thing. my APFS-formatted encrypted externals continued to (and still do) mount once i put in my passwords.

both externals simply show as "APFS (Encrypted" in Disk Utlity.

anyway, seems like a good idea; try @TonyJByrne's suggestion...

 

[vwfast]

I was having the same issue as OP and the recovery mode option worked for me. Thanks!

 

[netnothing]

I updated this evening and immediately hit this issue with two external drives, both encrypted.

Here’s how I solved it.

1) Reboot Sonoma into recovery mode and select the Disk Utility from the options provided.

2) Mount each disk, providing the the filevault passphrase.

3) Reboot. The drives should now mount cleanly.

I updated two machines and the first one asked me to sign into iCloud. The second one didn’t and that’s the one where I had the issue with the disks. I also couldn’t check the iCloud settings for the same machine.

Thanks. I tried this and sadly is hasn't worked.

I have reinstalled Sonoma from Recovery - hasn't helped.

I'm removing the encryption via my MacBook to see if that helps.

 

[netnothing]

I wonder if this has anything do to with the drives being HFS+ Encrypted?

I am testing the system with another external drive that I went to encrypt and Sonoma switched it to APFS. Once encrypted, the system works fine with it. Boots and mounts quickly.

I realize these are spinning HDDs, but should they be switched to APFS?

 

[internautic]

I have a OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad with four 4 TB HDD in it connected to my M1 Mac Studio. All drives encrypted. Since Sonoma, none will mount. Even from disk utility they won't mount. I removed the stored password in Keychain and when I go to mount it just hangs after I enter the password.

I can move the enclosure to my MacBook Pro (Intel) on Montery and they mount fine.

Anyone experience anything similar?

Yes I have the exact same issue. 4 encrypted drives all unmountable. One is HDD the other 3 are SSD.

Updated iMac Pro to Sonoma 14.0 - I had 4 external SSD drives that are now refusing to mount. They are each on separate USB cables and there is no way all 4 became simultaneously corrupted. Disk utility shows all the missing drives but as "unmounted" - i.e. greyed out. If I try to mount one, I get error: com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 49229. If I try "first aid" the Disk Repair app hangs.

 

[jomplox]

Ditto here. All three of my Sonoma machines fail to mount all drives. It is unlike all drives and all three computers failed at the same time

 

[internautic]

Well, I just performed a recovery mode reboot, did nothing because I forgot to write the steps down, rebooted once more to see the instructions and voilà, all the drives mounted. Go figure. Possibly related to some iCloud reauthentication that maybe didn't take after install?

 

[CuteBaby]

Same thing happened to me and a simple reboot fixed it, no need for Safe Mode, Disk Utility, etc.

Edit: The external drives are all APFS+ encrypted, some spinning and some NVMes. On M1 MBP

 

[gank41]

I've found that none of my Time Machine drives are mounting. Non-encrypted drives are mounting just fine for me, though.

 

[fisherking]

what format are ppl using? my APFS drives all work well, mount (2 of them are encrypted)...

 

[gank41]

what format are ppl using? my APFS drives all work well, mount (2 of them are encrypted)...

For me, they're all APFS Volumes, APFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted). Only my Time Machine drives.

 

[fisherking]

For me, they're all APFS Volumes, APFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted). Only my Time Machine drives.

wondering what the variables are. are these intel macs? silicon? again, have had no such issues with my 2 main externals all thru the betas (and now on the official OS release). hmmm 🤔

 

[gank41]

wondering what the variables are. are these intel macs? silicon? again, have had no such issues with my 2 main externals all thru the betas (and now on the official OS release). hmmm 🤔

I've had no issues like this all Summer, either. This is only happening on my 2018 Intel Mac mini. My 2020 M1 MBP has no problems like this at all. I'm going to try Disk Utility in Recovery Mode at some point...

 

[fisherking]

I've had no issues like this all Summer, either. This is only happening on my 2018 Intel Mac mini. My 2020 M1 MBP has no problems like this at all. I'm going to try Disk Utility in Recovery Mode at some point...

anyone else? intel or silicon macs?...

 

[netnothing]

wondering what the variables are. are these intel macs? silicon? again, have had no such issues with my 2 main externals all thru the betas (and now on the official OS release). hmmm 🤔

This all on my M1 Mac Studio. 4 drives, 3 are HFS+ encrypted, 1 is AFPS encrypted.

All work fine connecting to my Intel MacBook Pro on Ventura.

Attempting to decrypt one of the HFS+ drives to test. Taking forever

 

[vwfast]

wondering what the variables are. are these intel macs? silicon? again, have had no such issues with my 2 main externals all thru the betas (and now on the official OS release). hmmm 🤔

For me it's on my 2019 Intel iMac. First reboot after upgrade I logged in and had the normal password popup for each of my encrypted drives. I entered the password and checked the save in keychain box. It accepted the password like normal and moved on to each subsequent drive and then I went about setting up and configuring things. I rebooted a little bit later since I saw some weird issues with some applications staying behind everything. Logged back in and my drives weren't mounted and started exhibiting the symptoms listed above.