unmount disk from terminal

To see a list of drives attached to your computer, type:

diskutil list

Your firewire drive will likely be at /dev/disk1 or higher (disk2, 3, etc.), and you should see the main partition name(s) near the bottom of the list for each device. For example, the listing for my external firewire 40 GB drive is:

/dev/disk1
#: type name size identifier
0: Apple partitionscheme *37.3 GB disk1
1: Apple partitionmap 31.5 KB disk1s1
2: Apple_Driver43 28.0 KB disk1s2
3: Apple_Driver43 28.0 KB disk1s3
4: Apple DriverATA 28.0 KB disk1s4
5: Apple DriverATA 28.0 KB disk1s5
6: Apple_FWDriver 256.0 KB disk1s6
7: Apple DriverIOKit 256.0 KB disk1s7
8: Apple_Patches 256.0 KB disk1s8
9: Apple_HFS Boot_Tiger 29.7 GB disk1s10
10: Apple_HFS Boot_10GB 7.4 GB disk1s12

To unmount JUST the "Boot_Tiger" volume, I would type:

diskutil unmount /Volumes/Boot_Tiger

or

diskutil unmount disk1s10

and the Boot_Tiger partition would disappear off my desktop. To re-mount it, I would type:

diskutil mount disk1s10

(note the identifier column identifies Boot_Tiger as disk1s10)

To unmount the whole drive and all its partitions (which is what happens in OS X when you drag only one partition to the eject icon in the dock, unlike in OS 9 where only that partition would be unmounted), type:

diskutil unmountDisk disk1

Conversely, to mount the whole drive again (both partitions at the same time), I would type:

diskutil mountDisk disk1

Hi Tim

You can use Disk Utility from command-line to unmount a disk. Check out the following for syntax:

man diskutil

Jeff