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I’ve got an external USB storage device (hard drive) which I’m using for backups. Unfortunately manually deleting some old backups seems to have destroyed the hard drive, and now whenever I connect the device I’m getting a kernel panic in the HFS kernel extension. I’m working on the assumption that the data on the device is lost, and now I’d just like to make the hardware usable again by formatting the drive. But for that I’ve got to connect it to my computer, which immediately causes it to crash.

I can’t use the solution from How to Disable USB Auto-mount because I cannot find out the drive’s UUID (to do so I’d need to be able to connect it). The only other computer I have access to also runs macOS (High Sierra) and has the same issue. So I’m looking for a way of disabling automounting for all devices, rather than just a specific device. Is this possible?

Konrad Rudolph
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  • Can you connect it to a different computer and reformat it there? – nohillside Aug 11 '21 at 10:20
  • @nohillside As mentioned, the problem also manifests on the only other computer I have access to. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 11 '21 at 10:20
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    I should have written "non-macOS computer" :-) Anyway, https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/230054/9058 might work in your case. – nohillside Aug 11 '21 at 10:21
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    @nohillside Amazing, that worked. I had seen the answer on that other question but I had assumed that it would only “spring into action”, as it were, after the mounting had occurred. Turns out that, not only does it prevent the mount, it even succeeds in mounting the volume in read-only mode without crashing the OS. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 11 '21 at 10:28

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