Hardware :: External USB Hard Drive Unmount Itself?
Aug 6, 2008
I have a 2.5" hard drive connected via USB to my MacBook that keeps unmounting itself. This happens under some (what seems to be) undetermined amount of time, the drive will all of a sudden unmount itself and disappear from the Finder, Disk Utility, et al.
Is there some fix, setting or work around for this? Very annoying. If not, is there a way to re-mount the hard drive without turning it off then on or reconnecting the USB cable?
I replaced a 1 TB external drive partiotioned in 2 with a 3 TB extrnal drive run/store my corbon copy cloner back up and time machine.
The 3 TB drive was successfully partitioned through the disk utility and both back ups are installed and the initial back up is complete.
My question is about the 1 TB drive. I want to completely erase all data from the drive in order to use it for a different use.Â
Using disk utility one of the partitions deleted without incident when following the same protocol the second partition produced error messages.
Volume erase failedÂ
Volume Erase failed with the error:
Couldn’t unmount disk.
If I try to eject the disk
It says it will not eject becaus e a program may be using it...
The only program that utilized this partition is Carbon Copy Cloner which is not being utilized on the new 3TB drive.
I do not see where there is a option to have more than on disk chosen for this purpose so am unsure why the disk utility is seeing the old partion as still in use.
I have a MacBook Pro running OSx 10.9.4 and have been successfully using Time Machine with a WD My Passport External Hard Drive for a while. Now (after 10 days with a successful back-up), the computer will not back-up. I have gone into disk utility and tried to erase, partition, and/or repair the disk, but repeatedly get error messages - it can't erase the disk, re-partition the disk or unmount the disk.Â
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2010), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), External Hard Drive
My Mac Pro [with 4 internal disks, 2 External Disks (Sata Raid 0), and several external FireWire disks and a Voyager disk station] has a little problem with letting externals go Since a few weeks I have a problem with unmounting my externals. After unmount, the unmounted disk will mount again immediately.No time to disconnect cables and/or power. Hinders disk management, backup, and simple disconnecting disks. It only happens with disks (FireWire 400/800/ SATA and USB alike). USB sticks work fine.
I want to carbon copy my bootable external drive to my main internal bootable hard drive so I tried to use Disk Utility to erase it but it will indicate that it failed and can't unmount. When I tried to manually unmount by dragging it to the trash it indicated that it is in use. I can't understand why it's in use since I booted from the external drive which I wanted to the copy to the internal drive.
So so annoyed right now. Today my 12" G4 powerbook started to become slow, lots of spinning wheel, delayed menus etc. I checked file permissions, rebooted and it just kept on getting slower. Eventually it wouldn't get past the white apple screen.
I booted off the Tiger DVD and ran disk utility to fix and repair permissions again. It wouldn't let me repair the disk as I kept getting this error:
'Repair volume failed with error could not unmount disk'
I had to reboot again, and eventually my hard disk no longer appears in Disk Utility. I tried to boot into safe mode and get this:
'"I0ATAController device blocking bus I0ATAController device blocking bus I0ATAController device blocking bus I0ATAController device blocking bus I0ATAController device blocking bus"
So now I pretty much can't do anything with it. Failed Hard Drive?
In trying to repair my hard drive, which disc utility said was corrupt, it stopped repairing it because it could not unmount the disc?I booted my macbook pro from my backup hard drive.
I've just transferred my data to a new computer and now need to erase the hard drive on my old one.. I've tried Disk Utility, increased the security, and tried 'erase' but I keep getting an error message "couldn't unmount disk". I've gone into Partitions and tried deleting the HD there as well but I get the same message. I just want to get the computer securely wiped and would like to keep Lion as the operating system.Â
When I try to format my Western Digital "MyBook" external drive, I get an error. It says "could not unmount the disk." What does this mean, and how do I fix it? Also, what's the difference between Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and not journaled?
Unable to Use TIme Machine to backup a new Western Dig external 1 TB drive. It is connected through an adaptor to my Firewire 800 using a Firewire 400 with adaptor. I cant dismount the drive to reformat it to MAC using disk format utility.
I've been having problems booting into my OSX partition. At the time it started I wasn't using my Macbook Pro (Late 2009) very often so whenever I needed I just booted up into my BOOTCAMP partition. Anyways, I decided to finally stop being lazy and do a clean install. There's nothing on either partition of the same hard drive that I want. I put together a bootable USB drive and boot from it. From here I go to the Disk Utility and try to erase the entire drive. It gives me this error: URL....
Now, that's not a screenshot from my mac but its the exact same error. Anyways, I've tried to find something on point but I just can't. Some posts have stated that the hard drive is broken, but if that's the case why can I start up the BOOTCAMP partition of the exact same drive flawlessly? I can even manipulate files on the OSX partition from Windows 7.Â
My external hard drives simply refuses to eject/un-mount, and I've done everything I can think of to terminate any processes and/or applications that may be using the drive and preventing it from being ejected properly, but I haven't had any success. Is there some Mac-Jedi way of going about isolating what might be preventing this drive from ejecting properly? I've scoured the activity monitor but can't figure out what might be preventing the drive from ejecting?
with cloning/copying the content one an external hard drive onto a new external hard drive. Basically, I have a 500GB FW400 drive which I use to store my media files. It's full, so I purchased a 1TB FW800 drive to replace it. Obviously, I thought I could simply copy and paste the media files from the old drive to the new one.I cannot copy the media files to my internal drive first as my internal drive is only 250GB and nearly full itself.I have used Disk Utility to attempt to close the old drive to the new drive, but keep getting "insufficient space" errors.
Recently I bought 2 identical WD Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drives for my macbook pro 13 inch 2010. My aim is to replace the internal hard drive with one of the two I just purchased and use it as my system drive with Lion, Windows and Data partitions. And for the other hard drive I want to use it as a full disk back up for the internal drive (now 1TB hard drive). After I was done with setting up both windows and mac and data transfer, when I booedt into the recovery partition from the internal drive to clone the drive to the external drive, the disk utility gave me this error (Could not validate source - error 254). I also tried using Carbon Copy Cloner but it only could clone partitions, not the entire drive. Yesterday I downloaded a copy of Clonezilla. It worked fine until it had to clone an exFAT partition (my data partition). The exFAT partition appeared as 'RAW' partition in clonezilla. As a result, the whole partition appeared to be full and clonezilla had to copy every single blocks of data in that partition and the estimated time remaining was about 30 hours. So clonezilla is out too. Just want to ask if there is any program/application (bootable or not) which allows can do a full disk clone to an external hard drive.
I want to plug in my computer into my USB dock, automatically mount my external HD, have TimeMachine do its thing automatically (so far, so good), but then immediately after the backup finishes, I want the computer to automatically unmount the HD. This will allow me to close the laptop and go somewhere without having to constantly eject the HD everytime I unplug the computer.
So - what I need is a program / script / etc that will tell the computer to eject the drive as soon as TimeMachine is done backing up.
I have a Western Digital 500gb external hard drive, with 2 partitions, 'KAINARC' and 'JUNGLEMAC', connected to my Intelmac (Tiger 10.4.11 via my firewire, i have connected via usb but the problem is still the same). I may have shut down the drive improperly to cause this situation.
KAINARC now appears on my desktop, but the partition of JUNGLEMAC does not. I go to disk utility and both partitions are visable, KAINARC is mounted but JUNGLEMAC is not. I cannot mount JUNGLEMAC.
When i try to verify and repair the partition I get the message:
Verify and Repair disk �JUNGLEMAC� Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 non HFS volume checked 1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
So I try to verify and repair the partition KAINARC but get this message:
Verify and Repair disk �KAINARC� Repairing disk failed with error Could not unmount disk
So I have opened diskwarrior (unbelievably long time to start up and scan disks) in the hope of fixing the hard drive, but when i try to repair I get the error message 'unable to unmount KAINARC'.
I have tried other repair/recover programs but get the same message: 'Could not unmount disk KAINARC'. Im asuming that to fix the hard drive it has to be able to unmount KAINARC.
I've had a lot of problems with my iMac G5 power supply and since I have newer computers I've decided to get rid of this computer.Â
I want to save the hard drive and put it in a case, then use it as an external drive on my other Macs.Â
What sort of case do I need to shop for? Should I look for SATA or what exactly is the proper nomenclature.Â
Is USB 2 the preferred choice, or Firewire, or what? Is there a USB 3? I use a mid-2010 27 inch iMac with the intel processor, and I needed to buy an adapter to use my older Firewire external drive. Is Firewire a dodo?Â
i have a power mac g-5 quad with an external dvd drive and a external hard drive and 2gb of ram. on my ext. hard drive i downloaded mac the ripper and that is where i put all my dvds, now today on my pmac i was using mac the ripper, popcorn, itunes, safari all at once and it froze up on me?why? could the ram be an issue? how may programs can i use at once with my pmac?
Looking for opinions or comparisons on performance between an internal mac hard drive vs an external firewire 800 hard drive or better. Is the performance on an internal MP drive or iMac internal drive much faster than connecting to a firewire 800 drive? I'm sure it depends on the drive, I'm wondering about apple factory installed internal drive vs say a WD external firewire 800
In other words... I have moved my music library to the external hard drive, as per an earlier thread I read here on the forums. It worked like quite well. Now that it is working perfectly, I am having a hard time leaving well enough alone. It is never a good idea for me to think too much...Can itunes be installed and run on/from an external hard drive? If so, how?
I'm trying to erase my SSD internal drive that is corrupted software (Yosemite).I'm booting from an external with 20GB Yosemite OS & 480GB that contains files I've dragged off the internal SSD.I'm getting the error:Volume Erase failed with the error:Couldn’t unmount disk.How can I get around this?
my mac has a pioneer dvd drive in it and it wont read my dvd+r dl and I am wanting to burn a mac os 10.5.dmg to it and install 10.5 but the dang thing is ejecting it. So what should I do to get it to work get the external dvd and run it from it or get a external hard drive and try it that way.
This is what im trying to do. I have a macbook with 120gb hard drive. thats not enough space from my music collection. So i was wondering how to make itunes run off a external hard drive. I looked around and found was for a PC.
I have an elderly Q950 with an external hard drive with everything backed up onto it. The external drive is a Micronet ADV1000E, with a sticker on the back saying it's Macintosh or PC compatible. I also have an iBook laptop, & PC Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop. As I have the 2 laptops, the Quadra hadn't been switched on for maybe one year. On the weekend I tried to get it to boot up (with & without the external drive switched on), but all it does is display a grey screen with an image of a 3.5" disk with a '?' in the middle. If I start up from a Norton 3.5" disk it still can't find the external or internal drive. If I try booting up with my finger in the shift key it doesn't want to know.
1. Any idea why the Quadra isn't seeing either the external or internal drive & what can I try to do? 2. Is there any way I can connect my external drive to either my iBook or Dell? At the moment I have no cables to connect the old & new - are cables available & if so any idea where from? I've looked high & low but so far no joy. 3. Is it possible to remove the hard drive from the Quadra or the external drive & put in an external drive enclosure, then connect that to either laptop? I see there are drive enclosures available which are Mac & pc compatible. This by the way would be a major undertaking for me. I'm by no means a computer dunce but would be wary of trying it.
when I went into the "get info" window for the G-Drive and switched the ownership/permissions dropdown from "read/write" to "no access". When I tried to switch it back to read/write, it would say read/write in the dropdown, but then I'd try to access the g-drive and I'd only get to the first set of folders--when I'd click on a folder, there would appear to be nothing in it. (Not sure if this is really related to my current problem.) I then tried ejecting and remounting the drive, but it didn't show up on my desktop. Stupidly, I assumed my computer didn't recognize it at all and unplugged the firewire without ejecting thru disk utility. When I did this I got the device removal error. I then plugged the firewire back in and tried repairing the disk in disk utility, but it said it didn't need repair. When I click on the G-Drive in disk utility the info at the bottom says:
Mount Point :/Volumes/G-DRIVECapacity :465.6 GB (499,973,603,328 Bytes) Format :Mac OS ExtendedAvailable : Owners Enabled :NoUsed : Number of Folders :0Number of Files :0
0 Files! I'm worried about losing all my stuff! I then tried DiskWarrior (v4.0). When I first opened it I think the info at the bottom said "This disk is a Mac OS Extended disk. This disk does NOT appear on the desktop." I'm not quite sure about that "not" b/c after rebuilding the directory of the G-DRIVE I know it now says "This disk does appear on the desktop." Anyway, it's definitely not appearing on my desktop. After building the directory it said "All file and folder data was easily located. Comparison of the original and replacement directories indicate that there will be changes to the number, the contents and/or the attributes of the files and folders." And later: "19 files (and 2 folders) had a directory entry w/ an incorrect text encoding value that was repaired." And:
I then clicked "Replace" whereupon it said it was successfully replace. But still it did not appear on the desktop even after ejecting, remounting, rebooting computer, etc.
If anyone has any advice I'd really appreciate it. I'm pretty desperate here! Thanks!
(FYI I already tried going into the Finder permissions and unclicking and reclicking the box for showing disks on the desktop. Also, I plan on getting DataRescueII in case that's necessary, but i hope it isn't)
So, I've been searching the forums, as I just had a 1TB (well actually a dual 500GB) external drive stop mounting and start clicking on me. I'm trying to find a way to recover files, and I know I've seen a lot of posts on DriveSavers, which. I was searching around, and I was wondering if anyone has ever heard of a company called "OneWorld Data Recovery." It was something I stumbled across, but I can't find any reviews, or nail down anybody who's used it.
Clearly, this seems fairly suspect, but I figured I'd check and see if anybody had ever heard of it or used it. Thanks!
My internal 1TB hard drive on my iMac is dead and I don't have the money to replace it at the moment. I have everything backed up on an external 1TB drive using Time Machine. As a workaround for the time being,Is there any way I can install the system on the external drive and use that as the boot drive without erasing the Time Machine Backups? It seems to me I would have to have two partitions for the external drive, one for the system, and one for Time Machine. But is there any way to add a partition without erasing the existing one with Time Machine only on it? Â
