So macOS Ventura 13.2 has brought a certain meriad of problems, and one of them has hit me; marking the first time since using macOS as my main drive in 2011 to have a bug that actually prevents me from working.
The cause here is that I have an external drive that acts as my Time Machine drive, and with it, I usually have it plugged in every day to perform its routine backup. However, this day has had the drive mounting for several minutes, that I was wondering what could've caused it: A dead drive? Something about me trying to mount it on Linux? Maybe something about thermals? Turns out it was nothing of those, as after several attempts of trying to load the drive on different situations and recoveries, I've just let it run for a few minutes, and it finally shows up... as unmounted.
An overview of my external drive, both partitions (TM and Data) are unmounted after waiting.
After another 4 minutes, it mounts the data partition, but not the backup one. During this time, it locks up the OS really badly. If there's any program that interacts with storage, it WILL hang.
Data partition has mounted, and information has showed up.
After investigating, it turns out I'm not the only one having this problem. There have been multiple reports on the Apple support forums, and they're relatively the same: plugging an external hard drive is causing the system to spend a lot of time reading it.
Some people mentioned it could've been Spotlight doing an endless or very long indexing process throughout the entire drive, but I checked for activity during drive activity states, but nothing changed.
Here are some of the reports I've found:
- macOS Ventura 13.2 - Bug Fixes, Changes, and more #3
- Ventura not mounting my backup drive - Apple Community
- External hard drive takes forever to mount... - Reddit
Some of them even have some workarounds which involve restoring the OS, but I don't want to perform that unless I have a proper backup. After a few weeks trying to decide what to do, I ended up formatting the entire external drive... and that fixed it immediately. No joke.
So now, I'm waiting for my formatted drive to perform backups again. At least it works like it used to before.
Just have to wait the 5-6 local backups the Macbook made while waiting for the drive to do its thing.
Update: Before I performed the format, I've decided to check if 13.2.1 would fix it, but nothing.