External USB Hard Drives Disappear From Desktop After Updating to Ventura

Barney, I had tried toggling the Finder settings previously, but it did not help. At your suggestion, I tried again, but still no dice. Even running Disk Utility did not help. DU said that the volumes were mounted, but they were not showing up on my desktop. As a last resort, I erased both drives with CCC, and now everything appears to be back to normal. :)

Piqure, as I just told Barney, nothing seemed to work, not even running DU on both drives. So, as a last resort, I erased both of them and recreated them. Now they are both mounting on my desktop.

But one problem still remains. For some reason, there are TWO copies of my second external drive on my desktop. So even though I only have two external drives connected to my machine, there are THREE icons for them on my desktop. Both copies of the second drive say that they have 8 TB, so I don't know what is going on.

And by the way, the drive is NOT partitioned. I checked that just to make sure. It is just one solid 8 TB volume.

Barney, cmd-shift-C showed the same thing as what I actually see on my desktop. When I used Disk Utility yesterday, and clicked on the Partition button to see how many volumes there were, I noticed that it had the drive name twice in the "Name" section like this: MyHD,MyHD. I found this curious, because the graphic to the left did not seem to show two partitions.

Well, just now, hours later, I tried to eject one of the two seemingly identical volumes, and macOS said that there were two volumes on the disk, and asked me if I wanted to eject one or both volumes.

When I did a Get Info on both volumes, one had over 200 GB used, while the other didn't even have 1 MB used.

So I again went into Disk Utility and clicked on the minus button for the smaller volume and zapped it out of existence. Problem apparently solved.

So it seems that the second partition/volume was so very tiny, that it wasn't even noticeable on Disk Utilities partition graphic, but it was nevertheless there. I am wondering if CCC may have had something to do with the creation of that second, tiny volume. Who knows. But as I said, the issue is now resolved.