Apple’s Sonoma MacOS screws around with non-Apple format external drives stopping content access, users have complained, saying that it has done so for months and claiming the US tech giant has ignored the problem.
Mac users sometimes need external disks or SSDs to move files between Macs and other systems, such as Windows PCs and servers. Drives obviously have to be in a format accessible by both the MacOS and Windows operating system. One such is exFAT, the Extensible File Allocation Table format, developed by Windows in 2006 as a licensable item, which then became open for use by everyone in 2019.
exFAT is now pretty much a standard for moving files on disks, SSDs and SD cards between Windows, Linux and smart devices. Users are complaining that after upgrading from MacOS Ventura to Apple’s current MacOS v14 (Sonoma) is giving users problems with exFAT drives.
An Apple customer told us: “MacOS Sonoma messed up an exFAT formatted SD card containing dashcam footage. Literally all files vanished and Spotlight Search made sure recovery was going to be fruitless by stamping its mark on the filesystem although TestDisk/PhotoRec got some files back but mostly truncated MP4.”
“In the process Sonoma corrupted two Kingston SSDs. These appear to work fine on my Windows NUC but don’t want to risk plugging them in to my MacBook Air M1. They would literally not appear in Finder and I couldn’t figure out what MacOS was doing. Windows came to the rescue here.”
Apple’s community forum has a lengthy thread on the issue.
Poster BungalowBill92 is one of many reporting the issue, and in October 2023 he said: “Since I updated to macOS Sonoma, I’ve been experiencing issues with my external drives (in ExFAT). I can’t access them, nor can I access Disk Utility (which continuously displays a “Loading disks” message). Only when I use the Disk Arbitrator app to prevent the drives from mounting, it allows me to run Disk Utility and “First Aid,” enabling access to the external drive. However, the folder icon images are missing, and in the Sharing & Permissions info, it reads “You have custom access.” Is anyone else experiencing similar problems, or does anyone know how to resolve this?”
Poster feketegy reported experiencing an identical issue: “Having the same issue with external USB drives, USB sticks and external keyboards that are connected through USB on macOS Sonoma 14.2 and MacBook M3 Pro.”
There are 20 pages on this thread in the forum with users still experiencing the problem seven months later. Poster earz said this month:
“In all frankness I have to wonder just how much longer this travesty is going to continue. So many folks cannot USE their Apple product due to an operating system that seems to not be of any concern to Apple, and it looks like the crippled businesses who try to use the current OS and are not happy are not a concern either.
“I truly do not know of ANY OTHER scenario where the product remains ‘messy’ and ‘somewhat crippling to its users’ for so long. I truly believe Apple could care less about remedying Sonoma. Of course, they just might be sitting on a solution they will release with a price tag on it …some day ..maybe…IF they can fix the OS at all…”
Several posters suggest reverting to MacOS v14 (Ventura) to get their exFAT drives working again.
Elsewhere on the internet there are many similar forum posting threads: Reddit – r/<MacOS, Apple Insider, MacRumors Forums, Mac Help Forums and iBoysoft, for example.
In the MacOS Sonoma 14 release notes, Apple mentions a “New Feature” under the topic of File System. It states: ”The implementations of the exfat and msdos file systems on macOS have changed; these file systems are now provided by services running in user-space instead of by kernel extensions. If the application has explicit checks or support for either the exfat or msdos file systems, validate the applications with those file systems and report any issues. (110421802).”
The “user-space” term refers to everything within MacOS that isn’t in the kernel of the OS. Anything running in user space is subject to user ID access rules. These can limit file use and function depending on how they are set up. Kernel file access services don’t have any such file access issues as they run with root privileges instead.
It is not known if this is a contributor to the exFAT drive access problem or not – since Apple has not said anything about it – but the timing of the change is suggestive.
We contacted Apple’s media access service on May 20 relaying the issues above, and asking what Apple is doing to fix the issue, and will the issue be resolved in the forthcoming MacOS 15 (Catalina)?
There has been no reply.
Comment
It appears that Apple released MacOS Sonoma with inadequate testing of external drive connectivity and access. Four Sonoma point releases have not fixed the problem and Apple has issued no public statement recognizing the issue or committing to fix it.
