Can't Mount My External HDD

[mibo-4you]

In terminal:
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk2
1: EFI ⁨EFI⁩ 209.7 MB disk2s1
2: Apple_APFS ⁨Container disk3⁩ 2.0 TB disk2s2

/dev/disk3 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +ERROR disk3
Physical Store disk2s2

mibo@Mikaels-MacBook-Pro ~ % /dev/disk2 external
zsh: permission denied: /dev/disk2

Western Digital WD20EZRZ-00Z5HB0 - 2TB 5.4K RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.5" EXTERN Hard Drive

MacBook-Pro ~ % diskutil verifyVolume disk2s2
Started file system verification on disk2s2
Verifying storage system
Performing fsck_apfs -n -x /dev/disk2s2
Checking the container superblock
Checking the space manager
error: (oid 0x8cfa) cib: invalid o_cksum (0xffffffffffffffff)
error: failed to read spaceman cib 26 at address 0x8cfa
Space manager is invalid
The volume /dev/disk2s2 could not be verified completely
Storage system check exit code is 0
Finished file system verification on disk2s2

 

[casperes1996]

What did you think this would do?

mibo@Mikaels-MacBook-Pro ~ % /dev/disk2 external

What you're saying there is "run the program located at /dev/disk2 (the disk itself) with the argument "external"

Mounting a disk is done with "diskutil mount /dev/disk2" for example. If you want Unix-style mounting rather than macOS Finder mounting behaviour use just the mount command without diskutil.

Regardless, looking at the list output it appears like your APFS container superblock is corrupted

 

[mibo-4you]

What did you think this would do?

mibo@Mikaels-MacBook-Pro ~ % /dev/disk2 external

What you're saying there is "run the program located at /dev/disk2 (the disk itself) with the argument "external"

Mounting a disk is done with "diskutil mount /dev/disk2" for example. If you want Unix-style mounting rather than macOS Finder mounting behaviour use just the mount command without diskutil.

Regardless, looking at the list output it appears like your APFS container superblock is corrupted

superblock is corrupted means that all my data are destroyed?

 

[casperes1996]

superblock is corrupted means that all my data are destroyed?

Your data is most likely all in tact. But the disk doesn't know where the data is on the disk. I haven't kept track if recovery software has been updated for APFS but if there is any recovery software with APFS support then such software would likely be able to find most of your files and recover them all.
Based on a quick Google there appears to be solutions for APFS drives.

APFS is also supposed to have several superblocks for data safety though I'm not actually sure if that's only on a volume basis and not for the container table.

Guess you could also as a first step try just running First Aid on the container and disk from Disk Utility and see if that fixes anything. But most likely you'll need data recovery software; It can be a timely process but it should allow you to save most of the data on the drive

 

[mibo-4you]

What did you think this would do?

mibo@Mikaels-MacBook-Pro ~ % /dev/disk2 external

What you're saying there is "run the program located at /dev/disk2 (the disk itself) with the argument "external"

Mounting a disk is done with "diskutil mount /dev/disk2" for example. If you want Unix-style mounting rather than macOS Finder mounting behaviour use just the mount command without diskutil.

Regardless, looking at the list output it appears like your APFS container superblock is corrupted

Mean that is external drive

 

[mibo-4you]

Extern HDD are 5 TB.​

Run COMMANDS: in terminal — sudo gdisk /dev/disk2

Command (? for help): v
[v verify disk, p print the partition table]

No problems found. 13 free sectors (6.5 KiB) available in 2
segments, the largest of which is 7 (3.5 KiB) in size.

Command (? for help): p
Disk /dev/disk2: 3907029168 sectors, 1.8 TiB
Sector size (logical): 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 73164DBE-8EB3-4034-8A38-AAD393126326
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 3907029134
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 13 sectors (6.5 KiB)

Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 40 409639 200.0 MiB EF00 EFI System Partition
2 409640 3907029127 1.8 TiB AF0A

Can I survive my data? Or are all gone?​

Please help me!

 

[mibo-4you]

 

[HDFan]

I haven't kept track if recovery software has been updated for APFS

To my knowledge there is no software that will rebuild an APFS volume.

"Likewise, while the Volume Rebuild can repair many drives with volume structures problems, a full rebuild that reorganizes the volume structures can only be implemented once Apple provides further documentation.

It is important to note as well that Techtool Pro uses a low-level API to test, repair, rebuild, and defragment Mac OS Extended volumes. No such API yet exists for APFS, and it is unclear if Apple will make one available."

APFS support status - Micromat

It is understandable to conclude that Mojave, or Catalina support and APFS support would mean the same thing. However, the operating system and the file system are, in fact, distinct from one another. While the operating system serves as the ‘window’ for interacting with drives in many ways...

www.micromat.com

 

[casperes1996]

To my knowledge there is no software that will rebuild an APFS volume.

"Likewise, while the Volume Rebuild can repair many drives with volume structures problems, a full rebuild that reorganizes the volume structures can only be implemented once Apple provides further documentation.

It is important to note as well that Techtool Pro uses a low-level API to test, repair, rebuild, and defragment Mac OS Extended volumes. No such API yet exists for APFS, and it is unclear if Apple will make one available."

APFS support status - Micromat

It is understandable to conclude that Mojave, or Catalina support and APFS support would mean the same thing. However, the operating system and the file system are, in fact, distinct from one another. While the operating system serves as the ‘window’ for interacting with drives in many ways...

www.micromat.com

Some years ago I saw a talk that showed significant progress in reverse engineering APFS and tools for working with APFS including I believe a tool called APFS Sleuth

Even without having the ability to rebuild anything about the volume though, a tool could naïvely just read every block looking for magic numbers identify some file type and that way maybe be able to extract a few things too.

Plus, while Apple hasn't released good documentation for APFS, a lot of their APFS related code is open source

 

[colourfastt]

This is hardly a new problem. I haven't been able to access either of my external HDDs since 10.12 or 10.13 (I can't remember which, though I believe it was 10.13). Oddly enough, I can access thumb drives though.

 

[HDFan]

Some years ago I saw a talk that showed significant progress in reverse engineering APFS

Some vendors (CCC, Techtool Pro, Softraid, etc.) have limited APFS support, e.g. formatting an APFS drive. They just don't feel confident enough without the appropriate APIs and documentation from Apple to provide a repair/rebuild utility where a lack of knowledge would be disastrous even if they could get around the API problem.

 

[casperes1996]

Some vendors (CCC, Techtool Pro, Softraid, etc.) have limited APFS support, e.g. formatting an APFS drive. They just don't feel confident enough without the appropriate APIs and documentation from Apple to provide a repair/rebuild utility where a lack of knowledge would be disastrous even if they could get around the API problem.

The talk I'm thinking of was specifically about data recovery and inspection tools. Plus you don't need to rebuild anything in place. dd image it to a raw block image file and try and do recovery/inspection on that