Diskmanagement.disenter error 49218 | Apple Developer Forums

Hello everyone,

I'm having a little issue with mounting my external hard drive lately. I've tried quite a few methods in hope of getting it to work again, but so far, no luck. I hope someone can help me solve this issue, or those who have the same problem may also share your insights.

My external hard drive was working fine about a week ago. But one day, I ejected the hard drive and the icon disappeared, so I thought it was safe to unplug it. When I did, it said the hard drive was not properly removed. It still works fine when I use it the next day, but the same thing happened. It said the drive was not properly removed after I ejected the drive, waited for the icon to disappear, and then unplugged the drive. After that, it never works again, and the attached images are the info I got when I tried to mount or run first aid on this drive.

Please help & thank you in advance!

Computer: 27" iMac - MacOS Monterey

External Hard Drive: WD_Black 4TB. APFS encrypted

Grey out name.png

Error message.png

First aid run failed.png

terminal mounting failed.png

59k

Posted by

QS49218

I have the same problem. External SSD drive for Timemachine, APFS formatted. Creating the initial backup worked, then was running for some time and all of a sudden it can't be mounted anymore. Might be that it occurred after a reboot, I usually never reboot my Mac.

The same external drive was working before Monterey smoothly for over a year. After the update the Timemachine backup could not be finished because of some strange file conflict. Whatever, I reformatted everything and started from scratch and now I am in this new situation.

I think there is a sever bug somewhere in Monterey.

—
gnaegi
Same problem. External SSD for Time Machine, APFS formatted. Lost access with Monterey and can't get it back.

I did find this:

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/680500?answerId=676624022#676624022

Not formatted in ExFAT (APFS), but after entering command was prompted for password but had no ability to enter ($ sign was pre-entered.)

—
anotherapplefan
Same problem. Thanks a lot Mac Monterey. Now I can not access my files.

—
kiramau

Replies

I'm having the same issue. Is it something to do with the update?

Posted by

PoppyMacbook

Possibly… my problem started the day I updated OS to Monterey. I bought a different SSD housing and the problem went away.

—
kiramau

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I had the same issue - I plugged in the USB drive and one volume of three on the physical drive wouldn't mount, giving error 49218. MBP mid-2014 with Big Sur 11.6.8. Like some others, restarting my Mac (with the drive still attached - not sure this is relevant) brought them all back.

Posted by

croesus

Tried to reboot with the drive plugged in - did not help

—
Killidim

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Hi everyone, Today I was surprised by my MacBook with the same problem. I have the 4TB Sandisk Extreme on USB-C and I got this error. Tried a few things and by the time I have decided to give up and getting ready to delete the messed up partition and format my drive, I decided to give it a try on my iPad Pro Gen 4. Guess what. iOS can read the partition and right now I am in the process of copying everything of the Sandisk.

This is what works for me. I can see all the files and I am more than half way with copying.

Have a good day.

Uncle E

Posted by

UncleE

Uncle E, thank you SO MUCH for this! I had just checked back on this after setting a drive aside a while back and when I read this comment I gave it a try. Plugged it into my iPad Pro, opened Files app, typed in my password. Boom! Drive accessible all files present! Cant believe it was less than a day ago when you wrote this too!

In addition, password saved by macOS keychain was wrong, when deleted and drive plugged back in with password entered again suddenly working fine on macOS.

—
kDelta
I'd perhaps suggest others try checking if they have a password saved on the keychain, if so are you sure it's correct or could it be something else? Test on an iPad or take note of the saved password then delete it from keychain and try others you may have used, did it help? Let is know. Let's see if Uncle E has got us to the bottom of this!

—
kDelta
Hey kDelta, I'm glad it worked for you too. So, now that you are talking about passwords something clicked here. last week I set my MacBook Pro to unlock with Apple Watch. and the problem occurred for the first time on my iMac. The reason it works on the iPad is probably the watchOS being closer to iOS or actual iOS. I will try to disable this and see if I regain access. Apple needs us.

—
UncleE

I've had the same exact issue as everyone posting here. M1 Macbook pro connecting to a 1TB buspowered SSD with the error (com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 49218.) Very frustrating to say the least and makes me extremely leery of trusting APFS at all going forward. I'm in need of fixing this drive and using it this week but thankfully my drive in question has been backed up elsewhere so I'm afraid my only solution is to start over and use anything else besides APFS. 😔 Apple, please fix this terrible mishap!

I did however want to give any frustrated users some hope for their data:

Plugging my drive into an iPad does reveal all of the contents on the drive. Don't understand why at all but it's at least a way to help see what's on the drive. Thanks to Uncle E for that option!

And for any of those wanting to recover via "Disk Drill" or other recovery software, Setapp is a cheap subscription that gets you access to Disk Drill and many other apps. There's a free trial so you can grab all of that precious data: https://go.setapp.com/invite/mffb1pna

Hope that a fix happens someday and it's on Apple's radar 🙏

Posted by

blissabyss

As I explained above I have the same issue. So I need now an iPad in order to access my old data?? lol

—
Killidim
Yeah kinda crazy 🤦‍♂️ You could also sign up for the free trial of setapp and download Disk Drill to recover it on your Mac. Everything on the drive was available for me inside of Disk Drill to recover files if I wanted to but I had to everything backed up and reformatted the drive to MacOSjournaled to avoid any future hassles.

—
blissabyss

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I am having the same issue since I upgraded my computer to Monterey 12.5.1 I can no longer view my newest western digital hard drive on my MacBook Pro anymore. I have a passport 5TB drive and it is no longer mounting on my Mac.

Posted by

TiffanyLyn

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I'm seeing this with Big Sur 11.6.8 So far I've found that it happens consistently with two external USB spinning disks used for the Time Machine. Often one of the two will mount, Time Machine runs fine.

This happens to my macbook pro after using an external monitor/mouse. (External keyboard is bluetooth) After disconnecting the monitor/keyboard/mouse, sometimes one of the two external drives will work, if I plug it into a USB port that was NOT used for the monitor/mouse.

Consistently, both external disks work after a laptop power-off/on, continue to work with multiple unmount/disconnect cycles. The first time I use the external monitor/mouse, then disconnect them, plugin the external disks, one or both disk will not mount.

This looks like a bug in how the USB ports are reset after use.

Apple support recommended updating the operating system, a good answer. However, reading through all of these replies, it really looks like a kernel or driver use case bug.

Posted by

TEmerson

Did you read my post from above? If you plug your APFS disks in an iPad Pro iOS can see the partition and you can copy your data safely and reformat the drive. If you need more assistance let me know.

—
UncleE
TEmerson: I'm on Monterey 12.6 OS on my MacBookPro, and just had this problem take out my 3 month old external USB WD 16 GB HDD formatted in APFS. Upgrading your OS won't help.

UncleE: Thank you for a solution, but some MacBookPro owners don't also own an iPad.

—
DazedAndConfused

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Same for me. I have now three irrepairable APFS disks lying around waiting for the engineers getting their act together. That is more trashed disks in 5 years of APFS than in the 25 years or so that HFS+ is around. HFS+ was always salvagable somehow if there was a problem. APFS? not so much. What a poor performance on Apple's part.

Posted by

Roddi

I'm on Monterey 12.6. This morning I joined your 🔩 club with a 16 GB WD drive I formatted into APFS for videos being unmounted, then could not be mounted, then com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 49218. I see from the post above there is a ExFat disk format solution, but that doesn't solve my disk format APFS problem. I went APFS since I expected an Apple format to be more modern and reliable. Silly me.

—
DazedAndConfused

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Did you read my post from above? If you plug your APFS disks in an iPad Pro iOS can see the partition and you can copy your data safely and reformat the drive. If you need more assistance let me know.

Posted by

UncleE

Repeat.

—
DazedAndConfused

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My disk was an Samsung 8 TB SSD an 870 QVO with 8000 GB. Returned it. With the 870 QVO 4000 GB model I had no problems. Hard to say is it MacOS causing the problem or was it the hardware. I assume it was MacOS, because I first got a replacement disk, but it had the same problem:

initialising
partitioning as APFS or HFS+ (tried both)
first I could write and read to disk
after first removal from USB port, they didn't reconnect again
both new disks

Posted by

Pipobike

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I just went from an older version of macbook pro to the new M1 with Monterey. Whenever I get the issue you are all talking about I have to take the hard drive to my old mac and mount it there. After that, it works again on my M1. I guess it's the same as with the iPad solution. I just wanted to post it as I see a patters here. Obviously there's some bug in Moneterey and other OS systems are able to fix it, but not Monterey. So weather you have an Ipad or another mac with a different operating system, then it should work. Hope they fix it in later versions

Posted by

AdrianGhe4

I have the same issue but I don't have another mac. Nobody uses mac around me. The HDD doesn't work on other laptops at all. I'm sad because it's full (2TB) and the information is precious.

—
GueGeo

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Me too... Old TimeCapsule, working fine since. We lost a MacBoook, so we bought a new one w/Monterey and tried to restore from Time Machine. After a couple of hours, the TM disk is "empty". Put the disk on a different driver, we can see three partitions, the interesting one is 998GB in size, choched full, and it is not possible to mount. Disk Utility cannot repair the disk, something wrong with the partition allocation map.

Posted by

wandal

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Same issue here. I am a professional photography and use external hard drives all the time with NO issues. I bought a new Macbook Pro M1 and now I cant access any of my drives but 1. I have no idea what is going on. I am able to install bootcamp and use the APFS for windows by Paragon Software mounter to access the drive. So it is definitely a probably with the new OS on the MAc. But even my older Mac's can no longer access the External Hard Drives that I have been using for YEARS!!! Anyone have a fix? Please. I CANNOT lose any of the data nor the organization. WE are talking like 10TB of info that CANNOT be lost.

Posted by

SamuelPGonzales

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Hi there,

You might have better luck asking this question over in Apple Support Communities (https://discussions.apple.com) run by Apple Support.

Posted by

Fer_Apple

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Dud how in the world is that still a thing @ apple. My iMac crashed and then my ssd won't mount … sudo pkill -f fsck doenst work for me. fix it dudes …

Posted by

Apple99er

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I had the same issue. Is this issue fixed in APFS version shipped in Ventura ?

Posted by

cheetah

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