Why does my Mac keep freezing?

[StuMcBill]

Hi,

I’ve got a 2016 MacBook Pro (first Touchbar - MacBookPro13,2) which I have updated to Sonoma via OpenCore legacy patcher (and am fully aware that this may be the root of my problems), which keeps on totally locking up (beachball) when I have a USB hard drive connected.

I’ve tried 3 USB hard drives, a 2Tb (USB bus powered), a 4Tb (USB bus powered) and a 5Tb (externally powered). They are all formatted as NTFS.

Every time I have the 4 or 5Tb the computer will lock up (beachball followed by totally locking up), with the screen still on, but totally unresponsive. The “dummy” press of the trackpad stops working too.

It hasn’t happened with the 2Tb one yet?

Is this something I can diagnose, or am I asking a bit much of my old hardware?

Thanks
Stew

 

[Slix]

How old are the 4TB and 5TB drives? Maybe they could be failing and locking up the Finder?

 

[StuMcBill]

How old are the 4TB and 5TB drives? Maybe they could be failing and locking up the Finder?

They are a good few years old, the 4Tb has had a fair bit of use, but the 5Tb, although old, has hardly been in use.

 

[Fishrrman]

"They are all formatted as NTFS."

Hmmm...
Why are they formatted to NTFS?
Is there a specific reason?
Why aren't they formatted to a Mac format?
(for data drives that aren't backups, HFS+ is still best)

 

[StuMcBill]

"They are all formatted as NTFS."

Hmmm...
Why are they formatted to NTFS?
Is there a specific reason?
Why aren't they formatted to a Mac format?
(for data drives that aren't backups, HFS+ is still best)

They are NTFS as I use them with a Windows PC too.

Is there anything universal that I could use that is better? ExFAT for example?

 

[Fishrrman]

I'd switch them over to ExFAT...

 

[StuMcBill]

I'd switch them over to ExFAT...

I very well may just do that. Although, I’m thinking, I’ve had various NTFS drivers installed over the years, so I’m currently doing a Time Machine and sparsebundle backup, and am going to start fresh and see if that helps. I have probably got remnants of them all over my system.

If that still doesn’t work, I’ll need to find a way to convert to exfat without data loss, or buy a hard drive to backup and format to exfat.

 

[Bigwaff]

I’ve had various NTFS drivers installed over the years,

Sonoma changes how drivers are implemented. Uninstall any older drivers you have. You’ll need the latest version of any NTFS driver software compatible with Sonoma.

 

[StuMcBill]

Sonoma changes how drivers are implemented. Uninstall any older drivers you have. You’ll need the latest version of any NTFS driver software compatible with Sonoma.

Ok, I’ll likely give that a go first.

Is there anyway to find remnants of old stuff in the system?

 

[iMacDragon]

I don't think anyone has updated drivers yet for the new driver model
Was mixing up sonoma and sequoia which brings a whole new user space file system driver model.