macOS Tahoe fails to mount external drives

Solved! This happened after upgrading to 26.01

I went to Settings > Privacy and Security > Scroll to the bottom for Accessories and changed it from "Always Allow" to "Always Ask" I replugged my External Disks and I was asked to "Allow Accessory" Clicked ok and now it works.

Then I reset the Preference back to “Always Allow” Accessories.

Restarted and all of my Drives mounted.

Working fine for me. Check Finder settings, General tab to make sure the box to show external disks is checked. Do they show in Disk Utility? Can you mount them there?

As noted, you will see it IF you have a Mac laptop (with Apple Silicon). If you have a Mac desktop computer you will not see that option.

Allow USB and other accessories to connect to your Mac - Apple Support

Settings > Privacy and Security, scroll to the bottom and you'll see Accessories.

[Edited by Moderator]

Can you please confirm that you are using a FireWire drive with Tahoe?

Are you actually using a FireWire drive with Tahoe (using Apple adapters)?

I did all these steps and still it is not possible to mount the external volumes. Neither the FileVaults encrypted once (Backup Volume for Carbon Copy Cloner) not the APFS Encrypted once nor the APFS unencrypted once.

I change the Privacy and Security settings multiple times and rebooted the MacBook Air M3 every time afterwards.

If I connect my drives to my Mac mini M1 still running on MacOS 15, everything works fine.

Any idea what else I can change / try?

This option is not avalable on a Mac Mini (M1) - is there a fix as since Tahoe mounting of USB drives have been problematic. Sometime they mount, other times not with diskutility just hanging. As a workaround - I have to do a fix / scan on a Windows workstation for them to mount if they are in this state.

I have everything set right and it's still not working. Disk Utility doesn't see the Disks either.

I haven't been so lucky !

What Mac? The option is only present on Mac notebook computers, not on Mac desktops.

I can't seem to find "accessories" after I scroll down.