PSA: MacOS/Mac OSX Monterey External Drive Issues - Slow to mount, unmount or format

[Pickles von Brine]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to post this here for whoever may run across it. I have confirmed an issue with Monterey 12.0-12.1 where external drives (flash drives, external drives, ssds, etc.) are slow to mount, format or unmount. This issue is solved in Monterey 12.2. If you have issues, please upgrade to the latest version of Monetrey. 


~ Pickles von Brine

[Donut417]

51 minutes ago, Pickles von Brine said:

Hello everyone,

I wanted to post this here for whoever may run across it. I have confirmed an issue with Monterey 12.0-12.1 where external drives (flash drives, external drives, ssds, etc.) are slow to mount, format or unmount. This issue is solved in Monterey 12.2. If you have issues, please upgrade to the latest version of Monetrey. 


~ Pickles von Brine

Whats the consensus on Monetrey for Intel Macs? Heard some issues with it bricking machines and such. Have they fixed those issues? 

[BondiBlue]

13 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Whats the consensus on Monetrey for Intel Macs? Heard some issues with it bricking machines and such. Have they fixed those issues? 

I'm a Mac user, but I've had so many issues with Big Sur that I haven't even tried out Monterey yet. From what I've heard from others it isn't much better than Big Sur, so I'm not exactly eager to try it either. I'm back on Catalina, and it's a much better experience. 

[Pickles von Brine]

26 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

I'm a Mac user, but I've had so many issues with Big Sur that I haven't even tried out Monterey yet. From what I've heard from others it isn't much better than Big Sur, so I'm not exactly eager to try it either. I'm back on Catalina, and it's a much better experience. 

I haven't had many issues with either  big sur or monterey. I am in the computer repair business and work an AASP. As far as running on mac systems it runs fine. No issues other than the weirdness with externals. 

The one OS I had the most problems with was Catalina. That was mainly because a lot of users we had still had 32bit apps. Catalina dropped all support for 32bit
 

 

Though the computers we have had that came in with them not booting had hardware issues. So of course it would fail when upgrading. 

[BondiBlue]

20 minutes ago, Pickles von Brine said:

I haven't had many issues with either  big sur or monterey. I am in the computer repair business and work an AASP. As far as running on mac systems it runs fine. No issues other than the weirdness with externals. 

The one OS I had the most problems with was Catalina. That was mainly because a lot of users we had still had 32bit apps. Catalina dropped all support for 32bit
 

 

Though the computers we have had that came in with them not booting had hardware issues. So of course it would fail when upgrading. 

Interesting. I mainly work on older machines that are less likely to be running Big Sur or Monterey, but even my own experiences on newer hardware haven't been great. 

 

I didn't like Catalina at first. It ran worse than Mojave on my hardware, and the earlier versions had some odd issues. Nowadays it works perfectly for me. I'm running it on a 2012 15" MacBook Pro (currently my daily driver laptop), and despite being the oldest machine to officially support Catalina it runs really well. 

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, BondiBlue said:

I'm a Mac user, but I've had so many issues with Big Sur that I haven't even tried out Monterey yet. From what I've heard from others it isn't much better than Big Sur, so I'm not exactly eager to try it either. I'm back on Catalina, and it's a much better experience. 

Big Sur actually worked a bit better for me. I found some bugs in Catalina. BUT I have the last generation Intel Mac, so its like not that old. 

[BondiBlue]

16 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Big Sur actually worked a bit better for me. I found some bugs in Catalina. BUT I have the last generation Intel Mac, so its like not that old. 

It did terribly on a Late 2013 13" MBP, but it also didn't do great on my 2017 MBP either. I'm not too worried - I usually run a slightly order version of macOS in any case. 

[fede35mm]

Hey guys

 

Long time LTT viewer, first time poster. 

 

Issue is not gone. One of our work external HDDs got damaged after ejecting normally and now it won't mount. Recovery software can see the files and folders, but Disk Utility cannot repair it. The kicker - iPad OS can open the drives (see apple forum link below)....but not Mac OS. 

Gives error - Diskmanagement.disenter error 49218

I'm beyond peeved because of the time lost and having to get a third drive now to back up the sister drive (photographer with mirror copies of working hdds and final delivered files on remote NAS). The 'damaged' drive is fine, the OS is just messing it up. 

 

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/695361

 

I've tried killing fsck on Terminal, repairing and mounting on Terminal. Pretty much anything out there besides paying for recovery software. 

 

Any ideas? The information is THERE, drive is not damaged. I'm still buying a third drive. 

 

Seriously, I'm back to hating apple. 

[Pickles von Brine]

You have a damaged file system bud. As you said yourself. It got damaged after not ejecting properly. Do you know why OSX requires you to eject the disk instead of ripping it out? When OSX is using a drive, it isn't just sitting there doing nothing when the drive isn't in use. OSX is constantly updating file system components and they are hooked by the OS. When you yank a drive while OSX is using these file system components you run the risk of damaging them. In this case, that is what happened.
Nothing to do with the OS. I am surprised it opened on an ipad.

The drive isn't damaged. It is the file system that is. This isn't the fault of the OS. It is the fault of the user for yanking the drive while it was in use. Sorry to say it. Each time a drive is yanked on OSX you run the risk of this. Regardless of the file system but especially so for FAT32 and ExFat drives. NTFS, APFS and HFS have resiliency but kick out the right leg and they will corrupt too. Not all file corruption is repairable.  Make sure you eject the drives properly. 

When you have a damaged file system most cases OSX is useless in fixing it. Software is required. However, in some cases the file system cannot be saved and a raw recovery has to be done. 

 

The fact you loss data also shows weaknesses in your data handling strategies. It would be best to look into and possibly revise them to avoid this in the future.