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Can't eject external hard drive

After backing up my iMac hard drive to an external hard drive with SuperDuper, I closed SuperDuper and tried to eject the external hard drive so that I could disconnect it from my iMac and connect it to my MBPro.

However, I could not get it to eject after trying it several different ways by the symbol in Finder, by the Finder menu and by the eject button on the keyboard.

I finally turned the external drive power switch off and received the message that it had not been disconnected properly and may have damage data etc...

How can I safely disconnect the drive the next time I mount it?

Thanks for your help.

Vernon

iMac (Tiger) and MBPro (Leopard), Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Aug 26, 2009 7:09 AM

Reply
4 replies

Aug 26, 2009 8:24 AM in response to VRS

As was indicated, adding the drive to the privacy list for Spotlight helps. Of course this will limit your ability to search for files on that hard drive.

Ensuring no other application is reading or writing to the drive before you wish to eject it is another.
Shutting down the computer before disconnecting the drive will also work safely.

Since you had to remove it once unsafely, make sure the next time you connect it, any data you don't have elsewhere is backed up*:

http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

and then repair its directory*:

http://www.macmaps.com/directoryfaq.html

- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Can't eject external hard drive

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