Absolute Mac Hater

[JDP]

I have always used a mixture of operating systems.. Hackintosh back in the day, a few second hand macs and macs at school. However I have never felt I needed to throw this useless POS out of the window as I do now.
A combination of this Mac and my travel Macbook Air M1 (another POS) have destroyed 3 external hard drives so far. No matter the format I stick them in ExFat or Journalated none read on my machines... What machine does it run on? Indeed, Windows.... 2x Lacie drives dead, 1x WD dead. Also the MPBs keyboard is as good as 1 ply toilet paper after a heavy curry!

I am so thankful I work in an industry where I know how to restore data and have the tools available otherwise all my photos from my trip to Scotland would be lost. But it's no good to keep imaging hard drives....

Things I have tried:
Resetting
Resetting NVRAM, PRAM and SMC
Reinstallation of macOS (Sonoma 14.6 Beta)
sudo pkill -f fsck
removing fsck
change cables
When I look in System Information the external hard drive can be read.
When I try diskutil list with the drives plugged in, it doesn't work (works without them)
Mount via disk utility - with the drives plugged into the laptop disk utility does not work.
Drives all work and read in windows - but it's such an old machine it cannot work with CR3.
Always ejected safely - Apple still haven't worked out how not to corrupt data by pulling cables out without ejecting..
Running repairs in windows on the drives do not work (anything is worth a shot)

Cloud storage is a waste of money, I have a iCloud with 2TB and when I try and back up 980GB worth of data it claims I don't have enough space.

My next step is investing in a NAS system probably a Synology DS223J - not the best, I know, but I need to get something fast and I am already in perpetual debt....

Anyone else had this problem, if so were there any other steps you did?

Cheers!

 

[Sangoma]

I have always used a mixture of operating systems.. Hackintosh back in the day, a few second hand macs and macs at school. However I have never felt I needed to throw this useless POS out of the window as I do now.
A combination of this Mac and my travel Macbook Air M1 (another POS) have destroyed 3 external hard drives so far. No matter the format I stick them in ExFat or Journalated none read on my machines... What machine does it run on? Indeed, Windows.... 2x Lacie drives dead, 1x WD dead. Also the MPBs keyboard is as good as 1 ply toilet paper after a heavy curry!

I am so thankful I work in an industry where I know how to restore data and have the tools available otherwise all my photos from my trip to Scotland would be lost. But it's no good to keep imaging hard drives....

Things I have tried:
Resetting
Resetting NVRAM, PRAM and SMC
Reinstallation of macOS (Sonoma 14.6 Beta)
sudo pkill -f fsck
removing fsck
change cables
When I look in System Information the external hard drive can be read.
When I try diskutil list with the drives plugged in, it doesn't work (works without them)
Mount via disk utility - with the drives plugged into the laptop disk utility does not work.
Drives all work and read in windows - but it's such an old machine it cannot work with CR3.
Always ejected safely - Apple still haven't worked out how not to corrupt data by pulling cables out without ejecting..
Running repairs in windows on the drives do not work (anything is worth a shot)

Cloud storage is a waste of money, I have a iCloud with 2TB and when I try and back up 980GB worth of data it claims I don't have enough space.

My next step is investing in a NAS system probably a Synology DS223J - not the best, I know, but I need to get something fast and I am already in perpetual debt....

Anyone else had this problem, if so were there any other steps you did?

Cheers!

You say the drives were dead, then you managed to recover data from them?
Doesn't sound like they were dead, just something changed on them.

I haven't done much on a Mac for six years now, though I have a 4 year old Macbook I gave to my daughter (bought it and never used it), and my son at university has a new one, but never had any similar problems.

They do know how to make it possible to just unplug it without ejecting, but it makes things slower, but speed has always been one of their selling points, so I guess they chose that.


Only suggestion is to try a third party disc utility (Hirens often works) as the Windows repair often does not help. Sounds like you need to rebuild the non-data areas of the disks.

At work I used the same external drive on both Windows and Mac, except when it needed to be bootable

 

[nandbytes]

Never had a problem tbh. I use external SSDs all the time considering you can't user upgrade the internal storage and upgrading it upfront costs silly money.

p.s. not a apple fan boy, don't personally own any other apple device. I'm just sick of the virus windows and prefer arm based chipset.

As for backup I use Amazon photos. You get unlimited photos storage with prime subscription. All my lightroom imports i.e. keepers are automatically backed up to it. The current year lives on my MBP's local hard drive and all previous years on SSDs. Works like a charm for me. I also just dump all my RAW files on to spinning rust, I really ought to get better at deleting...

 

[F1.2]

I am a Mac fan boy , Hardly any problems on my 11 year old iMac

 

[JDP]

You say the drives were dead, then you managed to recover data from them?
Doesn't sound like they were dead, just something changed on them.

I haven't done much on a Mac for six years now, though I have a 4 year old Macbook I gave to my daughter (bought it and never used it), and my son at university has a new one, but never had any similar problems.

They do know how to make it possible to just unplug it without ejecting, but it makes things slower, but speed has always been one of their selling points, so I guess they chose that.


Only suggestion is to try a third party disc utility (Hirens often works) as the Windows repair often does not help. Sounds like you need to rebuild the non-data areas of the disks.

At work I used the same external drive on both Windows and Mac, except when it needed to be bootable

Very true. Perhaps better words would be -- dead on the Mac. Sounds much more drematic. I did some research and stack overflow suggested the fsck trick but didn't work - annoyingly.

That's good you've never had problems, 99% sure it's user error, at least I tried the turn off and back on again trick!

Hiren is what I normally use, but being journalated I dont know if that'll work - I might try The Sleuth Kit as it can run on macOS. Not sure the others will work - no harm in trying I guess!

Cheers!

Never had a problem tbh. I use external SSDs all the time considering you can't user upgrade the internal storage and upgrading it upfront costs silly money.

p.s. not a apple fan boy, don't personally own any other apple device. I'm just sick of the virus windows and prefer arm based chipset.

As for backup I use Amazon photos. You get unlimited photos storage with prime subscription. All my lightroom imports i.e. keepers are automatically backed up to it. The current year lives on my MBP's local hard drive and all previous years on SSDs. Works like a charm for me. I also just dump all my RAW files on to spinning rust, I really ought to get better at deleting...

I'd rather have a thick laptop which allowed me to upgrade internal storage than these thin ones with no upgradeability! My next move is invest in a few Samsung T7 or T9s as they seem to get good reviews, and if I get these HDDs working they'll just be for some cold storage.

Haha, I get that - ARM does seem quicker although sucks for virtualisation. I do need to see if the new macOS runs VMWare better.

I looked at trying to get onto Amazon Photos but everytime I tried to find a link I ended up on the description of what it's for, gave up, paid for the iCloud + and realised it wont work - That'll be deleted soon!

 

[nandbytes]

I'd rather have a thick laptop which allowed me to upgrade internal storage than these thin ones with no upgradeability! My next move is invest in a few Samsung T7 or T9s as they seem to get good reviews, and if I get these HDDs working they'll just be for some cold storage.

I appreciate that, and I really do hate apples model in this case.
It's a compromise one way or the other

I think I'll continue to keep my M2 MBA, I'm looking to see if I can get a mini PC that'll just sit on my desk and can do both gaming and editing.

Haha, I get that - ARM does seem quicker although sucks for virtualisation. I do need to see if the new macOS runs VMWare better.

I have use parallels and it works well enough. The issue is more that a lot of apps aren't built for arm windows and windows doesn't have a good translation layer like rosetta 2.

I looked at trying to get onto Amazon Photos but everytime I tried to find a link I ended up on the description of what it's for, gave up, paid for the iCloud + and realised it wont work - That'll be deleted soon!

amazon photos works on both osx and windows just the same. You can download a desktop app and ask it to back up folders on your laptop or external drives. I have just set it to back up my lightroom import folders.
It's pretty simple. If you already have prime subscription then you should just try it out. If not get a prime trial and try it out.

 

[ancient_mariner]

Since you mentioned the drives were dead for the macs but ok on windows, I had a lot of trouble with usb on a Mac, with it only working reliably for Apple devices and not 3rd party kit. Presumably you have thunderbolt connectors now, but worth considering.

I saw you listed reinstalling Sonoma Beta - if you're having trouble, any kind of beta software should ring alarm bells, and Apple aren't noted for a flawless OS.

 

[Nikon f1.8]

Since you mentioned the drives were dead for the macs but ok on windows, I had a lot of trouble with usb on a Mac, with it only working reliably for Apple devices and not 3rd party kit. Presumably you have thunderbolt connectors now, but worth considering.

I saw you listed reinstalling Sonoma Beta - if you're having trouble, any kind of beta software should ring alarm bells, and Apple aren't noted for a flawless OS.

This ^^^^^^

Beta software is just that, you are the one that comes across the bugs.

PS, I'm a Mac lover and I hate Window$ with a vengeance

 

[JonathanRyan]

Since you mentioned the drives were dead for the macs but ok on windows, I had a lot of trouble with usb on a Mac, with it only working reliably for Apple devices and not 3rd party kit.

^^^^^^^^ This

IMO Apple have never really supported USB properly. Stuff that works reliably on PCs via USB often works erratically or not at all on Macs.

Also, they have a history of releasing versions of OS X that don't work with all USB in the field and then slowly improving it. So as noted I wouldn't (ever) use an OS X beta and I certainly wouldn't use it with 3rd party USB.

PS Used to love Macs - now I'm pretty much all Windoze. The one elderly Mac I have posts an error every day saying that it needs OS X upgraded but of course Apple won't allow you to.......

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

We use several Macs and Windows machines and our main data is on plug in disks, a mixture of of SSDs and HDDs.

We haven't experienced any compatibility problems and we've been using the current set up for over a decade. Our three main data disks are formatted as Mac OS Extended, Journalled, case sensitive and work happily on all our Macs, though they're normally plugged into a 2012 Macbook Pro, which is now mostly used only as a server.

Windows and Linux have no trouble accessing those disks. We also have two double drives formated as ExFAT, so they can be plugged into the Windows machines and they work OK when cloning the data from the server and using it on the Windows machines.

As has been mentioned above, perhaps Sonoma is the problem.

 

[Craikeybaby]

What exactly is wrong with the drives? If you can connect on Windows it doesn't sound like they are "destroyed".

What are you using the drives for?

The only external drive issue I have had over the last 15 years of using Macs as my primary OS is one old LaCie drive dying (it was dead on all systems) and some Time Machine volumes being corrupted on my Synology.

Likewise what issue are you having with iCloud? How are you getting the files in to the cloud? Finder? Photos?

 

[Stephen L]

As you say you are experienced in IT, I'm surprised you are using Beta software in a live environment. Beta means it is still being tested for flaws. Probably you have found one. Report it to Apple.

 

[dragonfly]

Through necessity, I switched to Mac about 16 years ago from Windows and since they switched to Intel processors they have been very stable and reliable. I've never experienced any issues with external USB drives all this time. Currently, I have 2 spinning drives and 1 SSD attached and they run daily with no issues. As an aside, I find that I'm more productive using a Mac - the simple UI and 'no-faff' setup let me just go to work but I appreciate that this is personal.

 

[Pound Coin]

I didn't see Recovery Mode in your list of things tried. Boot into Recovery Mode and use Disk Utility from there.
Or set up a new Admin user and try Disk Utility from there.

Also, not all cables are the same - I see you have tried other cables, maybe try a Thunderbolt one if you haven't.

I'm on an Intel Mac, Sonoma 14.5, and haven't dipped into M processors yet. I did have a problem with USB SSD drives but that all seems to be resolved now.

 

[Brentor]

I'm on an Intel Mac, Sonoma 14.5, and haven't dipped into M processors yet. I did have a problem with USB SSD drives but that all seems to be resolved now.

Somewhat off topic, but how did you resolve this problem? ( I have a similar problem with one of my external drives on a Mac Mini with M2 using Sonoma).

 

[Pound Coin]

Somewhat off topic, but how did you resolve this problem? ( I have a similar problem with one of my external drives on a Mac Mini with M2 using Sonoma).

Several things (can't point a finger at any one, except the last), including updates, better cables, starting in Recovery and using Disk Utility from there. The thing I think made the most difference was stopping with branded SSDs (Seagate being particularly troublesome) and making my own storage up from NVMe chips and Firewire enclosures. They run hot, so I have a cooling fan to put them on when they are being heavily used.

OWC enclosures and a mixture of NVMes

 

[the black fox]

Another Mac fan boy here , never had an unsolved problem in about 20 years of ownership .. any problems in fact have been caused by me and my lad a Mac expert has cleared them quickly

 

[JDP]

Sorry I missed all the messages folks! A quick summary:

Mac decided to just not be able to read them anymore, incredibly fustrating. They were readable on my forensic windows machine (which is why I said they were dead) as the software I used can sometimes read dead drives (as long as they're not physically damaged!). I restored the photos which took hours as I had to image it into a dd RAW file and then copy it back onto another hard drive and the photos were recovered.

Each drive has now gone through a couple of wipes (none are SSD so I feel comfortable doing multipul formats) and they now read on my Mac again. Not sure what went wrong, perhaps being on beta, or just my MBP is a POS - who knows, but thankfully I was able to recover all 25,830 photos I took in Scotland!

I also saw a message about iCloud - it wouldn't upload any of my images it wanted me to zip them all, which is a me problem as it would have taken hours.

In regards to Beta on a live environment - true, I installed as I was playing about with home brew to see if I could get some stuff like Wine to work as I wanted a windows app on the Mac, and I just never thought to downgrade.

 

[dcash29]

Certainly rubbish when a fusion drive goes.