hard disk Toshiba _ Mac book air 2021

There have been a lot of reports about this issue on these forums regarding the M1 Macs and external drives. There isn't much information about the details, but some external drives are not compatible with an M1 Mac due to the USB controller chipset used by the external drive. I did see a user and an online vendor confirm the JMicron USB chipset used by some external drives had issues with an M1 Mac, but other chipsets may also have some versions that may not be compatible.

I suggest disconnecting all other external devices and connecting the external drive directly to the M1 Mac. If you need to use a USB-C Adapter, then try using a different brand or try the Apple USB-C to USB-A Adapter. I don't have a lot of faith in multi-port adapters, docks, and hubs for testing these things. Also try booting the Mac into Safe Mode to see if that helps. You may need to contact the manufacturer of your external drive to see if there are any firmware updates available for it to work with an M1 Mac.

FYI, a Mac should be able to read an NTFS volume even though macOS cannot natively write to an NTFS volume. If you want to share a drive between macOS and Windows, then it is best to use Disk Utility to erase the drive as GUID partition and exFAT so both operating systems can access (read & write) the drive without using third party software.

If you can see the files on the old drive connected to the Windows laptop, get yourself a new external drive and format it as exFAT connected to the Windows laptop. Copy the files from the old drive to the new drive formatted as exFAT using the Windows laptop. Then try that new external drive on the Mac in question.

When purchasing a new external drive to do the transfer, judge the size you'll need by looking at the contents that you're looking to transfer and go from there.

lucrezia88 wrote:

However, in my case, Macbook is able to see the hard drive; lots of files are readable but all my photos and videos are not even visible! They are in the disk if connected to a windows laptop.

Exactly! That is what many other users have reported on these forums since the M1 Macs were released. Some files & folders are seen on the external drive, but others are not seen. Most users seem to be using the NTFS file system on these external drives, but I think I've seen a few users mentioned it occurred with other file systems as well. I know there are some issues with the USB chipsets used on some external drives, but there is also a possibility some of the problems may be due to the NTFS file system driver in macOS on the M1 Macs.

You should always prefer file systems which have native support in each OS you need to share the drive. In this case exFAT is the best choice when sharing a drive between different operating systems.