themish wrote:
To sum this up.
1.Reinstalled Ventura.
Clean install or reinstalled over top of itself? If a clean install, did you thoroughly test things before installing any third party apps or restoring from a backup? If not, then you just brought the problem back to the clean install.
3. I started in Safe mode. Both HDDs are connected, and usable. Boot normal, they are not connected.
4. Formatted the second time machine HDD files to HFS.
6. Attached to my IMAC, THEY CONNECTED IMMEDIATELY.
8. Apple disk manager does not recognize them in normal operation. In safe mode both are visible.
10. I have one SSD drive that connects immediately, a Samsung 1 TB. Tested by connecting it to all four USB-c ports.
12. IN SAFE MODE ALL DRIVES CONNECT THRU A HUB and are directly connected to the computer. I have tested two hubs, no issues in safe mode.
13. In normal mode, external HDDs do not connect.
14. Drive utilities I use, Apple disk manager, Disk Drill, Paragon NTFS. In normal use, external drives are not connected. In safe mode, all disk utilities recognize them.
None of these steps made a difference, other than safe mode.
This all tends to imply you have some third party software installed which is interfering with the normal operation of macOS. To help us assess the third party software which is automatically launching during boot & login, run the third party app EtreCheck and post the complete report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. Safe Mode prevents third party software from launching automatically during boot & login so we need to determine what third party software may be causing the problem.
My solution is to eliminate using external drives and use cloud services for time machine backups.
While there are cloud backup services out there, you really should have a local backup option as well. Restoration from a cloud backup service can be slow, plus what happens if their service has an issue when you need to restore files?
Keep in mind that cloud file syncing services such as iCloud, Google Drive, Drop Box, One Drive are not backup services.
I have several other external drives I tested and they connected immediately.
It's not the computer or disk drives. It's Ventura 13.2.
6. Attached to my IMAC, THEY CONNECTED IMMEDIATELY.
10. I have one SSD drive that connects immediately, a Samsung 1 TB. Tested by connecting it to all four USB-c ports.
Not necessarily. Not enough specific details on these drives. Already mentioned third party installed software is likely the cause of the problem since Safe Mode appears to allow the external drives to work.
14. Drive utilities I use, Apple disk manager, Disk Drill, Paragon NTFS. In normal use, external drives are not connected. In safe mode, all disk utilities recognize them.
The third party proprietary software for external drives which typically includes the Paragon NTFS driver has been known to cause problems with accessing external NTFS volumes. In fact, these third party NTFS drivers were broken for many months after a macOS 12.x Monterey update last year. It is best not to use NTFS volumes and instead format an external drive using Disk Utility as exFAT if the drive is being shared with Windows, otherwise format the drive with either MacOS Extended (Journaled) or APFS depending how the drive will be used with this Mac and/or other Macs.
Edit: If one or more of these external drives are being used for Time Machine, then this is important information as well. With macOS 11.+, macOS now has TM drives formatted as APFS.
