Disk Drive ejecting itself

Yes, I wish I had bought the 3TB NAS instead of the USB drive. I suppose that is what I will now do, but I was also thinking in longer terms about the direction storage will have to take. Anyway, I do agree with you, thanks.

Hello all. I to have run not the issue at hand. With the iMacs at my school My USB flash drive would be ejected randomly (no it is indeed not cable related) Reading through the comments it would seem the OS forced the drives to eject mid data transfer. This is wierd to say the least.

Hello all. I have a seagate back up hard drive. Does anyone know how to fix the disk ejecting itself issue?

Apple has not made any effort to correct this OS issue. Many have indicated that they had some luck trying various cables, hubs etc., however Apple has just ignored the issue. There have been over 200,000 hits to this forum question alone and they have just chosen to ignore it. I had tried at least a dozen cables, multiple hubs with or without power as well as no hub at all. I had tried USB 3.0 disks, 2.0 disks and other users have experienced the same issue when using firewire drives or USB thumb drives.The problem is with the OS dropping the USB port as if you had pulled the cable without 1st ejecting the drive. The error indicates that the drive has been ejected unexpectedly when in reality it is still connected.

I am an IT tech and have worked on both PC and Mac systems since the Mid 80's. This issue began with new systems running OS 10 or those that were upgraded to OS 10. The systems that were upgraded developed the issue even with drives that had been in use before the upgrade for a year or more with no issues prior to the upgrade.

I have given my IMac away and gone back to Windows systems for my offices and all 12 of my external drives function perfectly on any of them. These are the same drives that I could not use reliably on the IMac.

iclick4u wrote:

Apple has not made any effort to correct this OS issue.

And you know this how? The lack of a released fix in no way equates to lack of any effort on the problem.

Thank you Boyd Jr. I guess we should all sit quietly, spellbound and full of admiration at how Apple are quietly working hard on the problem they can't even find the time to engage with the complaints here.

Well, while Boyd Jr. was sitting and waiting, I was calling the support and what did I get as an answer? "Ah no we have never heard of anybody, heaving this issue. It must be, because you have used another mass storage then time capsule. This is the only storage we recommend using."

Hello??

I'm a movie maker. I have 30 TB and more of footage on disks. And I did rely on Apple so far for over 15 years now. Might have been a mistake though.

Only this year I have lost maybe 1-2 weeks of manpower, fixing disks, repairing rights, rebuilding directories and praying the data could be read, when I plug the disk next time.

If I had more knowledge about the pc world and windows, I'd become a switcher.

This is what you get with low level support - they know nothing of the slightest value to anyone with more than a passing interest in their machines.

But, the issue is complex, from a technical perspective and a business perspective. I have two 3TB Seagate drives. One never has the slightest problem, and the other ejects within minutes of heavy use every time.

Neither has any problems on Windows machines. So, what's the problem? There have been many theories in this thread, but narrowing down the precise cause has eluded us.

I wonder whether Apple is ignoring us the same way they would if w started complaining about a floppy drive or the optical drive, i.e., because these technologies were/are on their way out and not worth following up on. That is the direction some of this thread has taken, and while it puts us in an unenviable position, I suspect this is the case.

It just occured to me that I haven't yet tried to fill my "bad" drive from my Win 8 Bootcamp partition. It never ejects from a Windows desktop machine I built, but I haven't tried it with Win 8 on Mac hardware. I'll see if I can find the time for it, just out of curiosity.

Anyway, I have decided to get NAS drives, as suggested above, and give up on this porblem that has persisted from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion. I'm pretty sure we'll never know the answer, the problem will never be solved, and this thread will be like arguing over how phlogiston works.

It just doesn't matter any more, whether we like it or not - I fear.

brian273 wrote:

at how Apple are quietly working hard on the problem they can't even find the time to engage with the complaints here.

If you haven't noticed, Apple almost never "engages" with these discussions. This is a user-to-user forum.

I'm not defending how Apple is dealing with this issue. I was only pointing out that the statement that "Apple has not made any effort to correct this OS issue." was made in a vacuum without any way to determine whether it's true or not.

nobullguy wrote:

Well, while Boyd Jr. was sitting and waiting

I'm doing neither. Not to downplay the problems of those with the problem described in this thread, I'm not personally affected by it.

"Ah no we have never heard of anybody, heaving this issue. It must be, because you have used another mass storage than time capsule. This is the only storage we recommend using."

This is Apple at its best. They are digging their grave imo. I've supported them for almost 18 years now and i still like using MacOS but little things like that makes me rethink my position. It is like the Apple USB SuperDrive that will only work on a Macbook Air! What's up with that? At some point, they will learn that by forcing people to only buy their stuff, poeple will start looking towards other alternatives. How fast the Android market is growing?

I am using a Dell USB3 drive in a Macbook that only have USB2, with Mountain Lion clean installed. But the ejecting thing is happening with USB3 connector anyway so USB2 is not the issue. When using Windows 7 in Bootcamp, that does not occurs (on the same Macbook).

I have read in another thread that when the Mac is running on batterie, it does not occurs. Well, after 4 times that my drive was ejected in 30 minutes, i unplugged my Mac and the ejecting it did not occured since. In energy saver, i did not check "put hard disc to sleep"... so i don't know what to think

No matter what i tried, i had an iMac doing this. Even connected the external to the air port. Still wouldn't work. Tried a brand new drive and that ejected.

Delete the time machine prefs in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

I knew that the drive was fine because I could mount it in terminal and run fsck on it with no eject.

I deleted the TM prefs and it found the old backups and did an incremental (after 83 days) on its own. Geez, I wish I would have deleted the plist first after all the crap I tried.

Ivan Robertovich wrote:

No matter what i tried, i had an iMac doing this. Even connected the external to the air port. Still wouldn't work. Tried a brand new drive and that ejected.

Delete the time machine prefs in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

I knew that the drive was fine because I could mount it in terminal and run fsck on it with no eject.

I deleted the TM prefs and it found the old backups and did an incremental (after 83 days) on its own. Geez, I wish I would have deleted the plist first after all the crap I tried.

This is interesting. I always wondered if the problem on my macs was related to Time Machine or Spotlight. Luckily I've always been able to solve mine with OnyX and Disk Utlility or Disk Warrior, sometimes easily, sometimes with difficulty. Next time I'm going to try the plist trick first.

copied from other thread for those interested:

I have a mid-2011 Mac mini with an external hp drive and the drive kept disconnecting. I watched the syslogs and couldn't figure out why. I suspected it was my iPhone getting involved as well, possibly insufficient power, etc.

Anyway, some had suspected that it was the USB port so I picked up an external USB hub (externally powered) and the problem has seemed to disappeared. Still, the system stalls when the external drive is being powered up, but TM runs without any problems.

For those interested, the USB hub is the DLink one, 7 ports with 2 high current. The iPhone plugs into one of the latter and the drive plugs into one of the regular ones.

bjl

I still did not give up on resolving this issue.

At least we can disqualify the following that I just did:

1. I have erased everything from my G-Tech HD and through my OS 10.8.4 MacBook Pro 2009 firewire connection I formatted my G-Tech HD to exFAT.

2. Using TechTool Pro 6, I have run a Surface Scan on my G-Tech HD - it finds a lot of bad blocks and ejects the HD in the middle of the scan.

3. Then I removed HD and connected it to a PC with usb cable. Via PC, I have reformatted it to NTFS with unchecked Quick Format which takes longer but checks the whole drive.

4. After reformatting to NTFS, I reconnected my HD to the MacBook and run Surface Scan again. TechTool did not encounter any bad block and HD was not ejected during the scan.

At this point, I was hoping that HD would stay stable and I can use it with NTFS format if I buy Paragon NTFS for Mac. And I was about to buy the Paragon app… my HD got ejected again from my MacBook.

So, reformatting to exFAT and NTFS did not help on my Mac. Now, Im letting my NTFS drive to be connected to PC to see if it would be ejected there. So far, it stays connected.

Once I conclude that the PC does not produce any problem, I'm planning to take my NTFS zeroed HD and connect to my newer MacBook Pro 2011. Will let you know the result.