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external drive not mounting

I have an OWC minstack stx connected Thunderbolt 4 to a MacStudio M1 max and the 8 TB hard drive is not mounting The SSD mounts and operates normally. I've reinstalled Ventura and on the first boot the hard drive appears and operates normally but after a restart it dissappears again. very frustrating! It operated fine under Ventura 13.1. any hints? I can't figure out how to go back to 13.1 and Apple support says they don't support that


Posted on Jan 31, 2023 6:16 PM

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Posted on Feb 6, 2023 11:29 AM

Hey Glenn,

I managed to solve this:

  1. Time Machine backup of the 13.2 installation.
  2. Formatted the main drive and reinstalled 13.1 from a hard drive.
  3. Upgraded to 13.2 once the fresh install of 13.1 was completed.
  4. Restored the data from the Time Machine backup.

Everything is now good to go! Time wasted: 1.5 work days.

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12 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 6, 2023 11:29 AM in response to Glenn Gronquist1

Hey Glenn,

I managed to solve this:

  1. Time Machine backup of the 13.2 installation.
  2. Formatted the main drive and reinstalled 13.1 from a hard drive.
  3. Upgraded to 13.2 once the fresh install of 13.1 was completed.
  4. Restored the data from the Time Machine backup.

Everything is now good to go! Time wasted: 1.5 work days.

Jan 31, 2023 7:08 PM in response to Glenn Gronquist1

I do not know what the cause might be for the failure to mount the drive. I have read many complaints about Ventura having difficulty managing external drives, though. Have you tried using Disk Utility to mount the drive? It would be a pain to need to do this every time, but I don't have another suggestion at this point. I have a Mac Mini that is still running Monterey because of concerns about this issue. It originally had difficulty mounting an external drive that I use daily. My solution was to set the drive as a Login item in System Settings. It's been fine since.

Feb 1, 2023 5:05 PM in response to BransonBowler

No. Setting the drive for startup on Login didn't resolve the issue. I deleted a couple of suspect Login items I thought might be causing problems (ie a toolkit installed from my Seagate Time machine drive which boots fine by the way.) the only wayI can get the OWC external drive to show is to either reinstall Ventura (then it shows only on the first startup) or unplug and replug it in. Once mounted I can access it with disk utility and all its contents are accessible. But on a restart, it doesn't boot up normally (or at all). The same connection boots the companion SSD without issue, very strange. Ventura 13.1 gave no trouble just after the upgrade to 13.2 the problem started

external drive not mounting

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