I am using a 2021 MacBook Pro 16" with an Apple M1 Max chip and 64 GB of RAM, running macOS Ventura 13.6.
I have been using an external drive, the Seagate BarraCuda Compute 2TB Hard Drive. Last week, I used it about five times to save some photos and work on Excel files. However, when I tried to open it the following day, it prompted me for a password, but it failed to mount.
The partition type is Apple_HFS, and it is encrypted because I used it with Time Machine a few years ago.
I can hear the noise it typically makes when I was working on it, but it doesn't mount.
So, I attempted to view it in Disk Utility, but to no avail. I can see the drive, but the partition I use appears gray, and the Mac attempts to mount it. When I try to click on it in Disk Utility, the application crashes, and I have to force quit it.
I also tried purchasing a new external hard drive reader to use with my hard drive, but I encountered the same issue.
I also tried to work with the Terminal, but it responds very slowly. For example, the 'diskutil list' command took approximately 5 minutes to generate a response, and when I attempted to eject it, it didn't work and remained stuck loading.
I have the last six years of my life stored on this drive, so it would be incredible to recover the data. Do you have any suggestions?
