Disk Drive ejecting itself

Sacash - Your problem sounds identical to mine...also have older computer - Powerbook - running 10.4, and hard drive works perfectly on it. Also have LaCie hard disk backup w/ separate power supply. Have been working on this via phone w/ applecare for almost 2 months...just took it in to retail store. I will post once I find out anything. So far, retail store was unable to replicate, but today I took in my LaCie and cables...we'll see.

Weird...apple folks don't seem to be aware of this problem.

Hey there.

I have been having this issue with my external WDC drive recently. It's about 2 years old, and I was worried it was dying by ejecting itself suddenly. This happened using both Time Machine/Super Duper for me.

Finally, last night I realized this ejecting might have been caused by a combination of a faulty USB connection/power source/broken partition. So I removed my "extending" USB jack, connected the drive directly into my iMac, *reformatted both my partitions (one I use for backup) as HFS+ with Apple Partition Map rather than GUID.*

The result?

No more ejecting as of last night, usually my backup would finish halfway than eject, it's managed to not eject using this. Crossing my fingers it doesn't start f*cking up again.

Hope this helps some people.

I just purchased a 1TB Western Digital Passport Essentials SE drive and I partitioned it three ways (windows (NTFS), mac (journaled), and time machine). Recently it has started ejecting itself even when I have set the computer where the external drive cannot be moved or disconnected by accident. I have several two other TB drives and a few 500 GB drives and they don't exhibit the same problems this one does. This drive also has a new USB connector that sort of snaps into the external drive, could that or the three partitions be the problem?

Hi there,

I have the same issue with one of my WD External HD (500GB) connected in FireWire (same issue when connected in USB), it self-ejects itself and prompts the famous error message. The drive itself is around 2 years old. I have another one (exactly the same) that I use for TIME MACHINE backups of the iMAC.
Problem that I have is that the problematic HDD is the one containing my iTunes library (>250GB of Music nicely tagged with cover etc...). It took me months to get all my CDs on this and just don't want to loose everything because I can't launch a proper backup.

Heeeelp

Basically, I am wondering if this is a pure HDD issue or linked to any other thing (the iMAC, the Snow Leopard OS, Time Machine)???

Strangely enough, my iPod synched and worked yesterday but is dead this morning.

Weird.

Any advise is welcome.
Y

My new LaCie 500G hard drive is also periodically ejecting itself from my desktop. (OS10.6.3) I unchecked putting the hard disk to sleep and it still did it. No auto backups. This seems random. 6 hours before it did it the first time, just 1.5 hours before it did it again. Both times I did not have any files open and was not performing any tasks such as copying or deleting files from the drive. I do not have this problem with my other computer running 10.5.8. I've asked questions at LaCie but they want me to blame it on a bad cable (which would be 2 different ones) or my operating system. Oh, and Time Machine is not running.

I’m having the same issue. All my drives are WD. It seems to keep happening with my 500GB drive. It happened once with my 1.5TB drive. It has not happened to my 1TB Time Machine drive though. I thought my drives were dead so I started to pull the backups off the Time Machine drives. But I’m beginning to think it’s an OS issue. I just updated to 10.6.4 from 10.6.3 and it’s still happening.

mmmh, more and more messages about this issue over the web.... I have an external Iomega 500G USB and the same problem seemingly since I've upgraded to OS X 10.6 . Very annoying as I have all my MP3 stored there.... Any official reaction from Apple?

I have newest macbook 13,3 and about a week ago I first saw the message about ejecting drive. Strangely, it all started with "USB draining too much power" message. It apeared just once. In the first USB port I had USB HUB with its own power supply. In the other one I had WD Passport 500GB disk. Since then, WD drive keeps unplugging randomly . Moreover, my external card reader started ejecting itself every two or three minutes, which is quite annoying. On windows machines both works flawlessly.

Happening to me too it seems. Started with one drive a few weeks back but there wasn't really anything on it so I didn't think anything of it. But now it has started happening with two other drives as well.

My equipment:
17" MacBook Pro with i7 processor with 4GB ram, running 10.6.3
1x 1TB Western Digital MyBook triple interface (FW800, eSata, USB2)
2x 1TB Western Digital Passport Essential SE (USB) - http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=722
1x 500GB Western Digital MyBook triple interface (FW400, eSata, USB2)
1x 500GB drive in a separately bought enclosure (this I got a couple of days ago, so no experience yet)

The original drive to have problems was the FW800 one, but as I said, it had nothing on it so I didn't think any more of it. Next one to fail was one of the Passport drives, and a complete fail at that. I was copying to that drive when I got the dreaded "Disk was not ejected properly" message. Ever since then I have not been able to access the drive. Whenever I plug it in, it normally appears on the desktop (along with the WD crapware partition) but then as soon as I try to access it the disconnect message appears. As this drive does not contain any stuff I can't bear to lose, I figured I could format the drive. Problem is, it always disconnects before anything can be done in disk utility.

And now, just this morning the 500GB drive disconnected while I was working on a Lightroom catalog stored on it. I don't even dare connect it again to try and copy the stuff off it as the backup of those is kept on the other Passport drive.

As for the computer, I've had it less than a month now prior to which I had a PowerBook G4. Never had any problems on the old one. The 17" MBP is running 10.6.3 and I have no additions installed - only applications which I gather are rather widespread (Lightroom, Adium, iWork, Chrome, Things to name most of them).

As there is no solution out there yet I figured I'd add my story as this problem might, or might not, be a bug in the system. More stories will mean more notice.

Tobbi G.

Just a quick update. The newest drive, a Seagate 500GB drive in a separately bought enclosure is in trouble as well. I was copying roughly 7 gigs of data over to it, not a movement anywhere close to the computer or the drive, when the dreaded "disk was not ejected properly" message appears. And now that drive will not be read by my MBP nor a Windows machine with MacDrive 8 installed. Seems the partition is messed up - as expected.

Although I've been lucky so far to not lose any important data - it only seems it is a stroke of luck. The time will certainly come that I am working on photos and this happens (so far the data lost is either MP3s or .mkv's ripped from DVDs).

I'm at a point where I am too afraid to work with these external drives. So essentially, I am sitting on 4TB of storage, but can't use it.

I have the same issue. My external drive is a Seagate FreeAgent Go Pro 500GB (for Mac). Using the firewire connection to my MacBook Pro (7,1) running OSX 10.6.4, I consistently get the error message: "disk was not ejected properly" when the MacBook Pro wakes up from the battery conserving sleep mode.

Add me to this problem. I just bought the new 21.5" iMac running 10.6.4. I have a 2TB WD drive and a 500 GB WD drive connected to a USB and Firewire port respectively. When the iMac wakes up from sleep sometimes the external drives have ejected themselves and I get the "The disk was not ejected properly. If possible, always eject a disk before unplugging it or turning it off" screen.
Anyone know what is going on and how to stop this?

Same here....driving me nuts...I have a 8-bay drive connected through esata, and every time I wake my system up, the drives have been improperly ejected error shows...

I started having the same problem today. iomega 500GB drive just randomly gets ejected. I'm on OSX 10.6.4 and the drive is plugged in directly to my iMac via Firewire 800. Happened about 4 times today already. Sometimes I was working in Adobe Lightroom and sometimes I was just sitting at the Finder with no apps open. Sometimes it happens quickly after plugging it in. Other times it happens after seemingly hours of work. Thought it was my external drive starting to fail, but given the prevalence of the problem online, maybe it's something else!