I'm having the same problem with my MacBook Pro M1 max. I have a 2TB external drive I was using with Time machine backups that I can No longer mount. Even disk utility won't allow the disk to be erased and reformatted. I would have thought that apple would have the solution by now seeing how so many have encountered this problem. can someone please help????

I've seen all the post on how to regain access to the disk, but how do I do that without erasing and loosing all my Time machine backups?