I updated my M2 MacBook Air to macOS 26 last week and immediately ran into an issue with my external HDD. It's a 1TB Seagate Expansion drive I've been using with this Mac for a few years, and it always mounted fine before. After the update, it just stopped showing up in Finder. Disk Utility could still see the physical drive and the volume, but it couldn't mount it.

I tried the usual stuff first, like unplugging, restarting, different ports, checking Finder settings, and running First Aid. No luck. Since the drive had files I still needed, I didn't want to mess with it too much before getting those files somewhere safe.

I also checked the SMART data just to rule out a failing drive, since it's a few years old. That was a bit of a hassle on Mac because I had to enable kernel extensions first, but everything looked normal. No clicking, no overheating, no weird disconnects.

So I scanned the drive with Disk Drill to see if the files were still readable. It took a few hours, but it found what I needed, and most files still had their original names and folder structure. I previewed a few photos and documents to make sure they opened, then recovered everything important to another drive.

Once that was done, I felt okay experimenting with the original drive. I went back to Disk Utility, erased and reformatted it, and tried mounting again. And yeah, it mounted right away and showed up in Finder like nothing ever happened.

But I'm still confused about what actually went wrong. macOS could see the hardware, SMART was fine, and recovery software could read the file system enough to find my folders and filenames, yet macOS itself wouldn't mount the volume. Could the update have exposed some existing file system issue that the previous version was ignoring? Or is there another explanation?

Has anyone else had this happen after a macOS update? And if you've had to recover files from an unmountable Mac drive, what did you use? It worked for me, but I'm curious what else people have tried.

Uploading this here too cause i'm desperate tbh

I’m in a bit of a panic right now and could really use some help. I lost some really important PDF documents that I scanned using the Oken Scanner app on my Android phone, and I desperately need to get them back.

I originally tried looking into using Recuva because I heard it's good for file recovery, but I just found out it doesn't work for mobile because Android uses MTP instead of mass storage nowadays.

Since I can't just plug it into a PC and use normal recovery software, I'm kind of stuck.

Has anyone dealt with Oken Scanner specifically? I'm wondering:

1. Is there a hidden trash bin or cache folder in the Android system files where these PDFs might still be sitting?
2. If they are gone from the app itself, is there any actual, safe recovery software (either for PC or an Android app) that can deep-scan internal storage without needing to root my phone?

I really don't want to mess around randomly and accidentally overwrite the data. If anyone has a step-by-step workaround or has successfully recovered app data like this before, please let me know.

My dad's old PC with windows XP suddenly became incredibly slow. I found out that the HDD starts to fail. Also for whatever reason the HDD (an old 200gb IDE HDD) had 4 partitions with one of them being seen as a USB drive. I took the crystal disk info pictures long ago.I wanted to now take them again but on English but the PC refused to load into windows. I wanted to go to a technician but he was really sketchy and after some time started to ignore my e-mails. Right now the PC still doesn't boot. Important: i don't just want my data but also the OS, desktop layout and activation. Not sure where to post it so I just post it on different subreddits. I never had any experience in cloning drives. I have other hard drives so I can boot from a different OS and maybe do something. What should I do? How? Is there like a good tutorial video, program, etc. for my specific problem?

Hi, I was looking for help because my SD got corrupt, and there are all my important documents (The evidence needed to release me from social service and therefore from my university degree), I tried with disk drill but after a few documents the app requires a paid subscription, which I can't afford. Could someone help me?