I haven’t accessed my external hard drive recently (around a year ago?). Maybe longer? Throughout the final three years? Without any fanfare or additional hardware, I simply placed the barebones 3TB Western Digital hard drive directly onto a Wavlink USB 3.0 HDD docking station. The hard drive spins up normally, emitting no unusual noises, but its read/write head seems to be struggling to access specific data sectors. You receive an error notification from your Mac indicating that the external drive is currently inaccessible and appears to be corrupted or damaged, preventing you from reading its contents.
Within Disk Utility, I notice the drive’s title, its size, and its designation as a CoreStorage logical volume – specifically, “Mac OS Extended (Encrypted)”. After accessing it on my MacBook previously, I wondered whether the upgrade to Sequoia would prevent the new operating system from recognizing the older formatting.
I have an older iMac running macOS Ventura 13.7.1, and I’m not anticipating any issues as long as the problem isn’t related to Sequoia. The iMac acknowledged that the data was encrypted and accepted the password to decrypt it. Despite repeated attempts, the drive remains inaccessible, refusing to mount.
Will prolonged inactivity have caused the drive to become corrupted? Have outdated file system configurations on older drives become increasingly incompatible with modern macOS operating systems? I previously dabbled in car restoration, but my skills have grown rusty over time. To be honest, I’m unclear about the current state of restoration software programs – does anyone remember when Norton utilities ran smoothly on a Mac?
