MacBook Pro 2021 (Apple M1 Pro) OS 26.7 continually reboots when external drive is connected.

Jaded212 wrote:

Hi Grant, thank you for also responding. I had tried running First Aid but it quickly failed. I tried it again, however, and while it still failed (see result below), it at least came up with a possible reason why:

"Checking prerequisites

Problems were found with the partition map which might prevent booting. Some information was unavailable during an internal lookup. :(-69808)

Operation failed..."

Sooooooooo, is there any recourse for me to extract the data from this drive?

If you need to recover data from it, then you need to be very careful here & minimize using this drive.

First, you need to check whether this external drive may have a hardware failure. To do this, run the third party app DriveDx (free trial period) and post the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar. You will need to install a special USB driver in order to access the health details of the external USB drive.

Don't do anything else with this drive until we have determined whether this external drive is healthy or physically failing if you need to recover data from it because you have no backup of it. If the drive is physically failing, then the more you continue to use it, the worse the failure may become where even an expensive professional data recovery service may be unable to recover any data from it.

External drive does not come up on another Mac laptop

try a different drive and compare your results...

try the problem drive in a different enclosure—search the developers website for an enclosure firmware update(?)

If the drive failed/enclosure failed then replace the unit.

If you value your user data

3-2-1 Backup Strategy: three copies of your data, two different methods, and one offsite.

More than one device, more than one backup methodology— and backup regularly.

if the drive is formatted NTFS - try updating your third party supporting software...

ex.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/NTFS-3G

https://iboysoft.com/ntfs-for-mac/

https://macfuse.github.io/

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

in Disk Utility, have you used the Repair-Disk /First-Aid function?

That may fix the drive if it has developed Directory issues.

run disk utility First Aid again until it gets hopelessly stuck on the same problem, or comes clean.

The most through way to do that is to use the tiny View menu in disk Utility to 'Show all Devices'.

then staring at the physical device (Top entry for this device) repair that and then proceed to repair each of the things indented under it.

Hi Leroy - thank you for responding. I have an older LaCie back up external drive I used on my older Macs and it was able to mount to my laptop.

I really don't want to erase and reformat this external drive as I will lose all the data on it.

According to seagate, this model does not have software that can be updated and is no longer supported. :(

Hi Grant, thank you for also responding. I had tried running First Aid but it quickly failed. I tried it again, however, and while it still failed (see result below), it at least came up with a possible reason why:

"Checking prerequisites

Problems were found with the partition map which might prevent booting. Some information was unavailable during an internal lookup. :(-69808)

Operation failed..."

Sooooooooo, is there any recourse for me to extract the data from this drive?

Update***. Thanks to all who offered support for my issue in this thread. I decided to replace the battery in my last MBP, back it up to a new back up drive instead of trying to resurrect the failed drive. :/ Will have to trust that I was able to replicate as much of the old drive as possible and move on.

Thank you all again.