External drives on Ventura

Ran into this on a MacBookPro M1 running Ventura. I was trying to mount an external drive connected thru usb-c. It would not show up at all after multiple tries. I tried logging off and logging on and still nothing. I did notice that the screen briefly flashed when I plugged in the drive. Finally I rebooted and then I saw a dialog asking me if I wanted to accept the external drive (not sure of the exact wording.) The drive then mounted. Subsequently, I saw the same problem again, including the flashing screen. This time I was able to observe the dialog box appear for just a very brief time before disappearing. After trying the log out, log in method to no avail, it occurred to me that another admin user was also logged in. I switched to that user, and the dialog box appeared without issue and I was able to get the external drive connected.

Has anybody observed this? Is there any way to disable this dialog or make it behave better? I suspect this may be difficult to trouble shoot as, once drive is accepted, it seems to mount without the dialog box regardless of the primary, front window, user. BTW, I DID check diskutil and it was not showing up at all until it did finally mount, so MacOS was not even acknowledging the driveā€™s presence before it finally mounted.

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A new ā€œfeatureā€ in Ventura is that the user has to approve any device being connected to the Mac, at least the first time. Iā€™m not surprised at the behavior shown when two users (or more) are logged in concurrently the first time a device (such as a hard drive/SSD) is connected. I donā€™t expect that behavior will ever change from this point forward. I recommend logging out everyone on a computer except one admin account user prior to plugging in a new deviceā€“I havenā€™t tested it, but I believe this would avoid the loop you got into. I hope.

This ā€œfeatureā€ is intended to enhance security, I believe.

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Thank you for your pleasant and quick reply. I agree with your suggestion. I was hoping there might be a way to mitigate the complexity. I suspect you are right about no other mitigation in sight. Perhaps this thread will help someone else with the this ā€˜mysteryā€™.

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Hi Folks, is there a way to ā€œrestartā€ that dialog? I might have accidentally disaprooved an external driveā€¦

Cheers Rolf