Disk Drive ejecting itself

Question

Level 1

4 points

Disk Drive ejecting itself

My Time Machine disk drive has been "ejecting" itself since I installed Snow Leopard. I'm not unplugging it, or turning it off. I'm not touching it.
I'm getting the following error message:
"The disk was not ejected properly. If possible, always eject a disk before unplugging it or turning it off."

My question is why would a disk drive be "ejecting" itself. I've turned off the auto backups, and unselected the drive as the backup disk. It is still "ejecting" itself which leads me to believe the problem isn't with Time Machine but with something else - something connected with Snow Leopard because this wasn't happening five days ago before I installed SL.

iMac5,1 Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Sep 9, 2009 5:40 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Razzkazz

Level 1

29 points

Aug 28, 2017 2:27 AM in response to judithnewman

I know this is an old post but people searching this issue will arrive here. This is what worked for me, hopefully it will help you too 🙂

I could be wrong but I think the cause of the issue is that OSX is putting the drive the sleep, similar to you closing the lid on your laptop, when that happens you get the same result. I have "Put the hards to sleep when possible" unchecked in System Preferences but as the hard disks still sleep this function obviously doesn’t work (I can hear the hard disks spinning down).

I tried a some code for Terminal but that didn’t work. After a lot of research on this issue I installed an application on OSX called "Keep Drive Spinning”, and so far (12 hours) the issue has not reoccurred.

Maybe the external HD / enclosure setup I am using is somehow not 100% compatible with OSX but could Apple fix this issue if they wanted too…..

Reply

Answer 2

Sep 9, 2009 7:19 PM in response to judithnewman

judithnewman wrote:
My Time Machine disk drive has been "ejecting" itself since I installed Snow Leopard. I'm not unplugging it, or turning it off. I'm not touching it.
I'm getting the following error message:
"The disk was not ejected properly. If possible, always eject a disk before unplugging it or turning it off."

My question is why would a disk drive be "ejecting" itself. I've turned off the auto backups, and unselected the drive as the backup disk. It is still "ejecting" itself which leads me to believe the problem isn't with Time Machine but with something else - something connected with Snow Leopard because this wasn't happening five days ago before I installed SL.

Does your external drive have its own power source or does it receive its power over the data cable?

Reply

Answer 3

judithnewman Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 9, 2009 7:46 PM in response to William-Boyd-Jr

Has its own power source. Right now I have autobackup turned off, and have de-selected the drive as the backup disk. It still dismounts itself. So I will probably turn it off and only turn it on when I want to do a daily backup - a real pain.

Reply

Answer 4

Sep 9, 2009 8:18 PM in response to judithnewman

judithnewman wrote:
Has its own power source.

That eliminates the possibility that it's dismounting because of marginal power.

Reply

Answer 5

jimmykl

Level 1

9 points

Sep 10, 2009 4:34 AM in response to judithnewman

Ditto this.

Ever since updating to 10.6 my two external USB drives have been spontaneously unmounting with the same error as above.

I have tried every USB port, running repairs in disk utility, running Yasu to completely cleaning out all caches etc.

I've never had any issues like this before with the drives or the iMac.

Possibly also related is that it is 'hard' to sleep the machine now. Every time I choose to sleep it sleeps and wakens immediately with the drive disconnect warning.

This never happened before the 10.6 update.

Help! It feels uncomfortable not being able to complete a super duper image backup and it concerns me that my time machine backups could be compromised too.

Reply

Answer 6

jimmykl

Level 1

9 points

Sep 10, 2009 4:36 AM in response to judithnewman

Also as with Judith's situation my drives have independent power supplies.

Reply

Answer 7

Sep 10, 2009 5:42 AM in response to jimmykl

Hi,

My FW800 Seagate is doing the same thing, and it only "ejects itself" when I boot to 10.6

The external HDD has its own PS.

Backups are very important to me, so I'm going back to 10.5 on the desktop and won't be installing SL on my laptops until this gets fixed.

Reply

Answer 8

jimmykl

Level 1

9 points

Sep 10, 2009 3:45 PM in response to judithnewman

It looks like this is an issue created by the energy saver preferences setting 'Put the hard disks to sleep whenever possible'. See this thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10175769#10175769

I changed this setting to 'on' and have not had any spontaneous unmounting issues since (two plus hours)

During this time I've completed a time machine backup and super duper clone from one USB drive to another - this always caused the issue previously.

Reply

Answer 9

judithnewman Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 11, 2009 5:00 AM in response to jimmykl

jimmykl wrote:

I changed this setting to 'on' and have not had any spontaneous unmounting issues since (two plus hours)

Don't know what my setting was - yesterday I went back to OS 10.5.8 - I had other issues: CS4 not working well, Pages not saving new docs! Don't know what else. I'll try again in a couple of months when there have been fixes.
Good luck to the rest of you.

Reply

Answer 10

judithnewman Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 12, 2009 4:18 AM in response to judithnewman

judithnewman wrote:

jimmykl wrote:

I changed this setting to 'on' and have not had any spontaneous unmounting issues since (two plus hours)

Don't know what my setting was - yesterday I went back to OS 10.5.8

I added a new external drive for TM - twice now it's dismounted itself - the first time I had the "Put hard disks to sleep" checked, the second time it was unchecked.
However what was common is that the dismount seems to have happened when I was waking the computer from sleep. So the next thing I'll try is keeping the computer from sleeping to see if that stops the dismounting.

Reply

Answer 11

judithnewman Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 12, 2009 4:23 AM in response to judithnewman

What forgot to say is this dismounting of the new drive is happening returning to OS 10.5.8! That hasn't happened before during the 9 months since I first installed Leopard. And I notice the computer is hard to wake - others have noticed that, as well. I've now set the computer to "never" sleep and see if that stops it. But ultimately that's not the answer - I think the problem has something to do with the screen saver - but I just don't know enough to have any idea how to trouble shoot this one.

Reply

Answer 12

Sep 12, 2009 4:43 PM in response to judithnewman

Installed 10.6.1 on the iMac the moment it was released- No volumes have ejected themselves since.
Computer has been running for the better part of 2 days, no shutdowns, reboots or sleeping, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

Reply

Answer 13

judithnewman Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 12, 2009 6:11 PM in response to Glen Carpenter

Glen Carpenter wrote:
Installed 10.6.1 on the iMac the moment it was released

Glen, where did you get 10.6.1?
I went back to 10.5.8 - if I reinstall 10.6 will I have access to 10.6.1 via updates?

Reply

Answer 14

Sep 12, 2009 6:52 PM in response to judithnewman

judithnewman wrote:

Glen Carpenter wrote:
Installed 10.6.1 on the iMac the moment it was released

Glen, where did you get 10.6.1?

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL930

I went back to 10.5.8 - if I reinstall 10.6 will I have access to 10.6.1 via updates?

Yes.

Reply

Answer 15

Sep 13, 2009 6:08 PM in response to William-Boyd-Jr

Well, no fix.

Logged in to report my external volume just ejected it self again.
Seems to me this is happening when I quit applications- But that might just be my imagination.

If I sleep the computer, the drive mounts itself successfully after waking and performs backups as expected, but I can't rely on this setup.

Reply