Problems installing Unreal Engine 5.4

[Aivolook]

Hello.

I am having very serious problems with installing Unreal Engine 5.4.

I tried to install it for the first time yesterday. Since the SSD on my Macbook is pretty small (256GB), I wanted to install it on an external SSD I have. So I just set the install location to the external SSD. The installation started normally.

The install ran normally to about 70%. Then it slowed down. It got stuck at 75%. It sat there for 5 hours, until I tried to cancel the installation. It didn’t let me cancel, and the Epic Games Launcher crashed.

Then I tried deleting the folder on my SSD where it was supposed to install. The folder was about 100GB. I moved it to the trash, but when trying to empty it, it deleted files very, very slowly. Like one second per one file. If i remember correctly, there were over 100 000 files on that folder.

Then I tried restarting my Mac. And guess what? Now the disk didn’t even show up on finder.

As a bonus; This is not the first time that this has happened. This has happened multiple times with the same computer and SSD. The other times I just formatted the SSD and gave up. But this time, I have important things on the SSD that I cant lose.

What do I do?

SYSTEM INFO:
MacBook Air M2 2022 (Base model)
8GB RAM
256GB SSD

External SSD: Samsung T7 Shield 1TB

[Aivolook]

I got it fixed.

I moved the important stuff away from the SSD and formatted it. It took about 30 minutes to even show up on finder.

I then created a symlink to a folder on the SSD, and installed it trough that.

It now works.

[ClemEagle]

Hi! Please help - I am in the same situation - how do you regain read access to the SSD at least? It is not showing up in finder or disk utility. The whole partition is gone, but some data might be recoverable partially with data recovery software. What was your approach? Many thanks

[AnnaFruit]

Same issue I just got my files visible again using Samsung Magician app but having hard times emptying the bin