Finder won't show mounted external drives

I’ll give it a try. Thanks for all the help.

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Same problem here a western digital hard Drive can be seen by the System report and I was asked to enable it with password as encrypted but will not show up on the desktop in Ventura?

Does DiskUtility show it as mounted though?

I have seen with both Monterey and Ventura that sometimes APFS encrypted disks will just not auto-mount properly upon connection. Even though passwords and keychain are all fine, from time to time the encrypted disk will just not mount by itself. Then you open DU and mount by hand and all is fine. It’s odd and not frequent, but I’ve seen it several times for sure.

No when it was not visible Disk Utility would not show it but it was visible in the USB bus under system info.

Very odd

This is a different scenario. If it’s on the USB bus, but Disk Utility doesn’t see the device, then that means Disk Utility either doesn’t recognize it as a storage device, or it can’t find any mountable volumes on it.

One thing I have seen is where a volume appears in Disk Utility, but it doesn’t mount and clicking the mount button seems to do nothing. This hasn’t happened to me for a long time, but when it did, it was because there was some kind of damage to the file system. macOS was running fsck to inspect/repair the volume, and that operation was taking a long time to complete (in one case, with a USB 2.0 hard drive, it took several hours), but once it completed, the volume ended up mounting normally.

More recently, I’ve found that when I connect an APFS volume with a lot of snapshots (my Time Machine volume or a CCC backup), it may take a minute or so to mount after connection. I assume this is macOS enumerating all of the snapshots. And volumes like this similarly take a minute or two to unmount (the Finder icon disappears immediately, but Disk Utility shows that it is still mounted and the in-use light indicates activity) before it is safe to disconnect them.

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Not directly addressing your problem… but I’ve found, when struggling with drive issues or just for routine volume operations, that the free program MountnuoM can be very helpful. In fact right now, while I’m struggling with some (APFS) volume-related issues of my own, I have it permanently resident in my Dock.

It’s a very simple app (no learning curve at all!) that lists all “Unmounted Volumes” and “Mounted Volumes” in its two tabs, and lets you mount or unmount them more conveniently than anything else I’ve used. Pretty reliable too. Not sure where I got it from, it was a long time ago.

The developer’s web site is here:

http://klieme.com/MountnuoM.html

It doesn’t seem to have been updated in a decade, but works fine for me

–Ron

Update: Upgrading to 13.3.1 forced the mounted external drives to appear on the desktop but still not in the finder sidebar.