Disk Drive ejecting itself

I have just started experiencing this problem since the recent 10.6.5 update. I have a new Western Digital 2TB My Book which it is externally powered with a single USB2.0 connector.

The disc will self eject after only a few minutes of connection. I tried various cables, power supplies and different ports, via a hub and directly to my Mac Pro all with the same results. I upgraded to the latest firmware with the same results. However, when I booted into 10.5.8 on the same machine using a different partition, the disc worked perfectly. Back in 10.6.5 it ejects.

I have not been using Time Machine on this disc, just writing files. "Put Hard Discs to sleep" is not checked in system preferences. All of the above leads me to believe it is an OS problem of some form.

I read the idea of shutting the machine down and unplugging everything for 30s and thought I had nothing to lose. Well it has worked so far! I will monitor progress. Thanks for the suggestions.

Message was edited by: David White

I just sent something to Feedback. Now we wait, I guess.

Folks,

Earlier today I spoke with yet another Apple support tech about the problem and he assured me that Apple knows of the problem and is working on it. Naturally he couldn't give me any further info, but I assume this is a positive sign. Yes? Perhaps?

I have discovered a funny thing. When I use my USB card reader under Mac OSX 10.6.5, it keeps on unplugging every now and then. I had a suspicion the problem is software based, not hardware, so I have tried the card reader under Parallels desktop Win7 and it worked flawlessly :-D Hope there will be soon a new Mac OS update fixing the problem...

Well, I finally had a few hours to spare where I could call Apple support and after running through the whole gamut of "restart in safe mode, unplug and hold the power button, repair disk permissions," the only thing that finally got the drive to mount was to just erase it (I wasn't worried about losing my backups).

However, if you're unwilling to lose your previous backups then this option probably isn't recommended. The "tech" that I talked to was pretty surprised at the whole situation and after I mentioned the number of users experiencing this same exact problem he said he would have to take it to the engineers. Maybe now something will get done?

So, since I've erased the TM partition, I backed up (again) using TM. Let's hope it doesn't do the same thing.

This is so poor....

I just bought a new mac book pro after selling my macbook

Trying to recover data from previous time machine backup and it just ejects the external drive..

I have circa 30k worth of files pics, itunes, logic etc and I either go directory by directory (painful) or just sit and wait for it to be sorted out.. running 10.6.6...

has anyone got anywhere with this, looks like lots of people having the same issues?

ideas?

I have been suffering the same problem with WD Passport drives connected to a MacBook. Like has been described previously, the drive would randomly eject without any apparent cause in system logs.

Yesterday I connected the disk drive via a USB Y-cable (commonly supplied with USB modems) which allows power to be drawn from two USB ports and since doing this the disk has been rock solid.

Perhaps something for others to try.

As good as it makes me feel the fact that I am not the only one with the problem, I must say I am feeling very uneasy as I have still not found a solution to this problem.
My external drive (Verbatim 1.5TB) is also ejecting (or un-mounting itself). The initial set up of the drive went fine, and the first back-up with Time Machine went smoothly. However, ever since the initial back-up I have not been able to back up again. When I turn the drive on, it mounts itself and remains mounted for 2 minutes or so. Then it unmounts itself and I get the message that the "Disk wasn't ejected properly.... Try turning the drive off before unplugging". I started believing that the Time Machine is the problem, so I thought I would just erase the drive completely, forget about the TM and use SuperDuper! for future back-ups. However, I wasn't even able to erase the drive (through Disk Utility) because, once again, the disk un-mounted itself during the process.

Feeling completely helpless....

I have a late 2008 iMac 3.06ghz with 4MB ram and Snow Leopard 10.6.6.

This is a pretty heinous problem. For me, it was a USB card-reader and fat-32 formatted cards from my digital camera. I tried reformatting them in the camera and in the computer. Each time I get a "Eject before removing" error when I reintroduce it to my mac. The disk spontaneously ejects between 10 seconds and 10 minutes. Sometimes it gets caught in a loop of eject-remount. I thought it must be the cards, so I tried some new ones, different make, and unfortunately it was the same. I threw out my card reader, and bought a more expensive one (my iMac is pre-built-in card reader), and it was the exact same problem.

The only thing that seemed to help was unplugging the one or two devices I have plugged into my computer and use just the card-reader. This worked for about 10min until I tried to copy a file to the card, and it began spontaneously remounting and ejecting itself again.

I tried the same setup on my old Powerbook G4 running Leopard 10.5.x, and everything worked beautifully, no problems at all.

This makes me believe that it's a problem with Snow Leopard. I remember that Apple reduced the power output on their iOS devices at one point, I wonder if that change found its way into Snow Leopard and is causing havoc with some devices? This of course is conjecture.

The latest for me is my new iMac 27" has started spontaneously ejecting my USB hub. I first noticed this when I had to restart to get my SoundSticks to work - I have the original ones which are connected by USB (why USB, I never understood). Then today I noticed my iPhone, connected to the same hub, didn't charge. At first I thought the hub had been accidentally switched off, but no. Unplugging and replugging the hub into the iMac solved the problem.

The hub is a powered Adaptec one and worked perfectly okay over generations of the OS since I bought it in 2003. It still works fine when it's reconnected so it's something in 10.6 which is dropping it.

I too have had this problem but it now seems fixed. I'll outline what I experienced with the hard drive failing though in case it is actually a different issue than what many of you are experiencing.

I have a 300gb WD passport. I purchased a season of Weeds while staying with my parents over the holidays. I put the episodes as well as my photos from the trip on the drive. I was able to use the drive just fine on my iMac at home. Last time I used it there was yesterday morning.

Last night, I tried copying the episodes to my iBook while housesitting. Every time I started to copy and paste, the drive would auto-eject, the action would stop processing (getting 400mb into 9gb done) and occasionally I'd also get an error that stated I didn't have permissions to perform the action.

I'm not a computer god. I was fairly certain my drive didn't have permissions set-heck, there isn't even a lock slider thing-a-ma-bob on the side like most larger drives have. I googled and found this forum, which unfortunately didn't give me the warm and fuzzies. Fortunately for me, all the files I need are still on Mom and Dad's system but it would take months for them to send my way. I'm just glad I don't have this issue with any backup drives (knock on wood).

As a somewhat last resort, I ran disk utility and verified the disk first (said it was fine) and then repair (still said it was fine) and voila! It works. I don't know why. I don't really care, I'm just glad it works. (I also downloaded the disk manager software from WD in case it could do something but the disk utility route worked before I installed it)

Maybe this too will assist someone else, even though using disk utility is probably the first thing smart people do 🙂

In case it matters, I'm running 10.5.8 on both machines...they're both 5+ years old and can't run 10.6, boohoo 😟

Message was edited by: sarush...changed h-e-double-hockey-sticks to heck since it was starred out. Whoops.

I posted in another thread about the same topic. I have a Drobo that was connected tommy Mac mini via F800 that started spontaneously ejecting about 6 weeks ago when I was still running 10.6.5. It holds all my movies, tv shows, and iTunes music. There was no apparent reason for it ejecting; checking the console only revealed "disk2s2: media is not attached" at the moments leading up to the ejection popup message. Sometime this occurred while reading/writing data, other times while the computer was idle with no programs running. I have a second external HDD connected to the mini via USB for Time Machine backups, and it never ejected improperly.

Both Disk Utility and the Drobo Dashboard app reported that the drives were healthy. Permissions did not need to be repaired, nor were there any other errors. Testing the Drobo on another Mac yielded the same random ejections, connected via FW800 and USB. As a last measure before buying a new storage device I ran the DiskWarrior utility, which reported that the Directory structure of the drive was out of order. The utility was able to rebuild and replace the directory, since which time I have had zero random ejections.

I have a Drobo with 3 WD drives (1TB / 1.5TB / 2.0TB) and is connected to my MacBook 2.2 via USB2.0 running Mac OS X 10.6.6.
Suddenly my Drobo started spontaneously ejecting after few minutes installed.
It holds all my movies, photos, tv shows, and iTunes music. There was no apparent reason for this ejecting; checking the console only revealed "disk2s2: media is not attached" at the moments leading up to the ejection popup message. Both Disk Utility and the Drobo Dashboard app reported that the drives were healthy. Permissions did not need to be repaired, nor were there any other errors.
Any tip or help
Thanks
Alex

Just got a Drobo S set up with my Mac Pro (via a SiI3132 Silicon Image 2 port eSATA 300 PCI Express card), with 5 x WD15EARS (Western Digital 1.5Tb Drives). Time Machine got through about 2 mins worth of back ups (I started TM right after boot up) before the Drobo was un-mounted. Rebooted the machine, the Drobo reappeared in the Finder, tried Disk Utility (to make sure there's no permission errors) and the drive again un-mounted after a few minutes.

Just contributing my experiences to add more fuel to the 'please do something soon about this silly problem' fire, irritating the lot of us.

I did not connect the dots until I read this thread, but I too have developed External Hard Disk Ejecting by Itself symptom after updating the OS to 10.6.6.

1) Shut Down
2) Unplug all USB peripherals
3) Boot
4) Plug in External HD's
5) Run Disk Utility - Verify, then Repair for an external HD
6) Repeat 5 for each external HD

Getting a hint from an earlier post by sarush, I did the above steps, for the 3 external hard drives (all 3 of them "Western Digital 1 TB My Passport 071A Media" (the name displayed under Disk Utility)).

The hard drives seem to have stopped ejecting themselves now.

Message was edited by: Kiraku. Fixed misspelling.