Apple Disk 2

[Shameka Roessler]

Anywaysif your disk happens to be ExFAT, and you remember improperly removing the disk the last time you used it, chances are, fsck is holding it hostage (metaphorically, of course). fsck is trying to repair the disk, but it will stall forever, so you want to launch Disk Utility, and the Terminal. Try to mount the disk, and switch to Terminal and write sudo pkill -f fsck. The disk will mount in read-only mode, and from there, you can repair it with First Aid in Disk Utility. This won't work for non-ExFat drives, as macOS manages them differently.

This happened for me on a Big Sur MacOS, clicking the 'First Aid' option in Disk Utility kept giving me this same error. What ended up working for me was restarting my laptop, then continuously trying 'First Aid' until one time it suddenly didn't give me the error, and after waiting about 20minutes the drive mounted properly. I don't think I did anything differently other than trying over and over again.

This still isn't working for me. I don't understand what this "and the Terminal" means. When I try to mount my drive, the error that is the title of the forum comes up and it appears I am at a dead end. I tried to repair the drive, and it seemed to do something (with a bunch of green check marks) saying it was fixed, but it still won't open or be recognized by my finder or desktop. If anyone is able to walk me through this, I would be very appreciative.

This time, though, even after running First Aid in Disk Utility, the drive is still registering as Read-Only, which I'm not sure how to fix! Anyone have any suggestions or have experience with this? The drive does have about 1.5 TB of data on it, and it hasn't completely backed up to my cloud storage yet, so ideally not anything that requires reformatting (fingers crossed)

The quickest way to sort out problematic exfat drives I've found is to mount them in a windows environment (either in a virtual machine or on actual windows computer) and repair them from there. Disk first aid takes a loooong time on larger drives.

Thankyou @jkrosado and @calif94577. It worked out but without hitting the enter button, magic! Also the exfat formatted LA CIE 5GB drive worked on BigSur before then after upgrading to Monterrey it didn't show up.

I tried that command on the Terminal, the 'First Aid' option on Disk Utility said everything was OK and then same Could not mount drive error, I restarted , tried it few times, same error. Dont ask me why but what worked was Logging Out my Mac user and logging again with the same user, super weird. There's defo some bug on Monterey and the external drives / Time Capsule Mac application...

Hi everyone! I have followed the steps and Disk Utility is running first AID. I have got a SEAGATE 2TB ExFat formatted...but first AID is running "Checking file system hierarchy." and it has done so for 24 hours...is that normal for a 2TB? I am tempted to quit it....

Hi there, My external HDD (LaCie Rugged 4 TB, MacOS Extended (Journaled) formatted) doesn't show up on the desktop. It is visible in Disk Utility but I can't repair it. The system returns com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 49244..

Checking file system and repairing if necessary and if possible.Volume is already unmounted.Performing fsck_hfs -fy -x /dev/rdisk6s2Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-583.100.10).Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.Invalid B-tree node sizeThe volume could not be verified completely.File system check exit code is 8.Restoring the original state found as unmounted.File system verify or repair failed. : (-69845)

I ran into this issue with a Western Digital 2TB drive... I had seen some irreperable disk errors and was ironically, attempting to back the drive up so I could reformat it... so, I was panicking because I've got some important data on the drive and was starting to research data recovery tools. After messing around and doing some research, I discovered the system was trying to run a filesystem check on it and was getting hung up.

At this point, I opened Disk Utility and ran First Aid... which ironically unmounted the drive and then got hung up again... DUH! So had to repeat the process. At this point, with the drive mounted, I backed up the drive and reformatted it.

This doesn't really help. I don't want to lose all the info I have on my external drive. You've made it sound like it's the drive issue but it's really with how the new Catalina update is working to read these drives. Please provide a better fix. I need drive access without reformatting & it's worked fine up till the latest update.

@Starburns we shouldn't have to look for alternative solutions to get assets off of external drives. It's insane. @Apple needs to respond to this thread. There's 13 pages of 'try this' and 'try that', most of which fail. I work with video files that are on multiple drives and I need to swap out drives daily. I should just be able to plug in the hard drive and bam, there it is on my desktop and ready to use.

I found fsck.hsl in the activity monitor under the 'disk' tab - I forced quit this and the an error message came up to say that the disc cannot be repaired but the drive mounted immediately and I can now copy my files to another external drive.

I first tried to repair the drive (go to Utility > Disk Utility) then finding and selecting my external drive (which was displayed but greyed out) then hit the first aid button and then wait for the first aid repair to fail. This would fail on the fsck.hsl. Find the fsck.hsl file in your activity monitor (open this app) then under the 'disk' tab force quit this file name (search for it) and the drive should mount immediately. You can now copy your files to another external drive. Good luck

im having trouble with my external hard drive as I won't mount. I was going to try this but don't have a clue what it would even do! im not too good with computers (sorry if this is a stupid question)

So I tried everything, absolutely EVERYTHING and currently I have Catalina, tried to update to Big Sur but since I have a MacBook Air I don't have a lot of space for that. What worked for me was going to Launch Pad - Open Activity Monitor - and then Force Quit fsck_ext. After that my external hard drive magically appeared on my screen again! I was this close "." to buy a new hard drive.

I recently purchased a new IMac and upgraded it to Catalina. BIG mistake!! I have this same problem and it will not mount any external hard drives. These drives all still work fine on my old macBook running Mojave 10.14.1. This problem started when I Accidentally unplugged a drive and didn't trash the icon first. Another problem is Disk Utility and some other programs will not respond to a QUIT command. The only way to get them to quit is to force quit them. I assume you will have a fix soon???

Thanks for this hint. I had 116G of "purgeable" space and reclaimed that by toggling the local snapshots in Time Machine. This is a much more useful reply than the boilerplate article answer I got from Apple Support.

The solution I found was to turn OFF all of the optimize settings (iTunes, Mail, Photos, etc.) you can find articles about this online. And then my Apple support agent had me reindex my spotlight. Through all of these steps my "purgeable" data went from 60GB to less than 10GB. Hope this helps someone!

After much ado it turned out that the Photos library was the root cause of my problem. I had got into problems with this file as I was running out of storage space on iCloud. Photos therefore assumed that it could not reduce the local file despite me having moved out a huge number of photos to offline storage.

After making all the necessary backups I simply deleted the Photos library file from my Mac. After a restart I had almost an empty disk. I then simply created a new Photos library and marked this as the primary sync library. The iCloud process worked perfectly restoring all my picture and better still only keeping a small number of the photos as full size in the library. It still allocates some purgable space BUT I now have some 50Gbytes free space instead of 5.

That all said it still appears to me that purgable space is NOT truly purgable. Surely there should be something to allow us to at least see what is taking up the space, and something to allow users to remove files from this space.

Same for me. I did not select the optimize function, but found that 40gb of my files had been arbitrarily and randomly tagged as purgeable by the system. Including new files that I did not want removed from my HD. This was a week ago.

Then yesterday, those files were purged. For no apparent reason or trigger. Are they gone forever? How to prevent more files from being purged? Who knows, cos Apple aren't giving any info or options on how to manage or prevent this.

If you have TimeMachine enabled it might be that local snap shots are the issue. Generally when the backups are successfully completed, the OS will delete the local snapshots. I have seen a delay in this which causes the local snapshots to remain.

An option is to disable local snapshots but know that this will delete any TimeMachine local backups created between TM backups. It not delete any files other than the backups that have not been written to TimeMachine.

Thanks Chastings -- that was exactly my issue here as well. I'd disabled iCloud Drive and the purgeable space was not being reclaimed (subtracted from the "free space") and reported erroneously. I hope future point releases make this easier to DISABLE completely, and revert to the previous OSX ("pre-MacOS"? lol) behavior.

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