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 drive’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. I’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 don’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 device–I haven’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€˜mystery’.

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

Cheers Rolf