I normally don’t write about beta bugs, but I’ve seen lots of people discussing this one and also received customer questions about it. I can reproduce it on my Mac, though not for every HFS+ volume.<\/p>\n\n
Apple<\/a>:<\/p>\n HFS external media might fail to mount automatically. (168672160)<\/p>\n Workaround:<\/strong> For macOS only, use CLI tool This also affects disk images, both creating them and mounting them on macOS 26.4 (even if they were created using another version). I discuss some workarounds for DropDMG here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n Thomas Rohde<\/a> (Reddit<\/a>, MacRumors<\/a>, 2<\/a>):<\/p>\n Apparently Mr. Macintosh<\/a>:<\/p>\n I tried to warn as many people as possible about HFS issues but I did not at the time know it was Thomas Rohde<\/a>:<\/p>\n I have 7 (seven!) external drives that I currently can’t use 🙄<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n Corentin Cras-Méneur<\/a>:<\/p>\n Finally figured out how to properly mount my external HFS drives under macOS 26.4b1! […]<\/p>\n They are all standard hard drives and I never migrated them to APFS because I didn’t want the loss of performance (plus, I’ve seen some pretty nasty corruptions on APFS that were really REALLY hard to recover from while I have my faithful DiskWarrior for HFS+).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n Previously:<\/p>\n Update (2026-02-20<\/a>): See also: Dave Nanian<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n Update (2026-03-02<\/a>): Apple replied to my feedback saying they think the bug is fixed in beta 2 (Reddit<\/a>). It looks to me like it is.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I normally don’t write about beta bugs, but I’ve seen lots of people discussing this one and also received customer questions about it. I can reproduce it on my Mac, though not for every HFS+ volume. Apple: HFS external media might fail to mount automatically. (168672160) Workaround: For macOS only, use CLI tool diskutil mount […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2026-02-19T21:21:55Z","apple_news_api_id":"9bdaf815-d386-48ab-b9c1-2b4764bf36af","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2026-03-02T16:49:01Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAg==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/Am9r4FdOGSKu5wStHZL82rw","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[131,1396,371,2670,30,2742,174],"class_list":["post-51038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-bug","tag-disk-image","tag-dropdmg","tag-hfs-plus","tag-mac","tag-macos-tahoe-26","tag-storage"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51038"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51115,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51038\/revisions\/51115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}diskutil mount<\/code> to attach the relevant disk device.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n
fsck_hfs<\/code> is broken<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n
fsck<\/code>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n
\n
diskutil mount<\/code>—suggested as a workaround in the release notes—was SURE not cutting it. I had to use sudo mount -t hfs<\/code> instead (specifying the filesystem format and mount path manually). What a pain it was!<\/p>\n\n