Q: Disk Drive ejecting itself

I had the same issue using a Powerbook G4 with a brand new Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB drive. I have the same model of the Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB which I bought in Asia with no problems of self-ejecting. But this new one that I bought on Amazon, plugged it in and bam, same problem as everyone else.

Tried the old USB, tried reformatting, tried turning off Time Machine, nothing worked. Finally I went back to a USB Y-cable and now it works fine. Has not self-ejected once. I am not a fan of the Y cable because it takes up 2 USB ports at once, but it works, so I'm happy

My 2tb LaCie drive has started doing this too, only since I bought a new iMac on the first day of the recent refresh, Snow leopard was on the old one and had none of these problems, I've checked the connections and nothing is wrong there and I'm doing the disc utility check now.

I'm really getting sick of it.

One Girl wrote:
I went back to a USB Y-cable and now it works fine.

It sounds like that drive needed more power than was being supplied by one USB port. Does that drive have an option for an external power supply?

My problem has gone away...

About a month ago I posted to this forum that all but one of my externals was self-ejecting whenever I did anything processor intensive. Without fail, the USB (self-powered) disks would eject when I would watch videos on YouTube for more than 10-20 minutes. The one disk attached via Firewire has never self-ejected. The problem got progressively worse to the point where the disks would self-eject much sooner. In fact I couldn't synch my iPhone, as all it's data is on one of the externals that ejects and it would usually eject during a synch.

I unplugged all my USB disks and only plugged them in when I needed to get something from one of them.

I was somewhat convinced that my problem was connected to Flash in some way. (I know it sounds crazy) but...

As soon as the Flash 10 beta was announced, I installed it. Since that day, the disks have not self-ejected once. I haven't changed the way I connect my drives, the way they are powered or the way I use my computer, nor have I updated anything else.

It's a weird bug. I'm not convinced what I did will solve the problem for others. All I know is what I did and what the result is.

I had this problem with my Seagate 2TB GoFlex Desk drive. I initially solved this problem by downloading Seagate's diagnostic tool which contains a driver for the USB drive that prevents the drive from going to sleep (the setting in the Systems Preferences does not work by itself).

That solution, however, caused a bunch of clutter in my /var/log/kernel.log file which I didn't care for. I removed the drivers and to prevent the drive from going to sleep, I instead added a simple cron entry to do a directory lookup of the drive once every 10 minutes. Since then, I haven't had a problem with it ejecting or producing kernel.log errors.

I have been having this same problem with my LaCie 2TB External USB Hard Drive that is used for time machine spontaneously ejecting itself seemingly just after it finishes a back up and today it has started doing it while backing up and it is still showing it is attached, this is getting very frustrating as the pop up opens OVER any other window and stops any typing.
Power supply is fine, new cables installed and still the trouble persists, this has only started since I got my new iMac on the refresh day last month

I have a 2 TB Free Agent Desk that was self ejecting at 20 minute intervals.
Very frustrating.

Here something that worked for me.
1) System Prefs > Energy Saver > Uncheck Put the hard disk to sleep
2) Connect disk to the USB port on the keyboard
3) Restart.
5 days without Self Ejecting and counting.
I hope this will help.

I have two external HDDs, both directly connected by FireWire to the iMac (not daisy chained). The Lacie d2 Extreme holds my iTunes library, and the Seagate Freeagent Desk handles Time Machine backups. I noticed today that neither were mounted, and spent an unhappy hour or two when I should have been working trying to figure out why. Shutting everything down and then powering up the Mac, followed by the drives and then connecting them to the computer resulted in the Seagate drive mounting, but then ejecting itself within a minute or two with the attendant warning message. The Lacie wouldn't mount at all, and neither drive could be detected in System Profiler.

I tried the Lacie drive on my MacBook Pro and it wouldn't mount on that either, but I noticed that the power supply was buzzing. Did a search on this, and found that these power supplies are very short lived, and if they are buzzing, the drive won't mount. I've since plugged the Seagate back in on its own and all seems to be well with that again. It mounted fine and after an hour or so it hasn't ejected itself.

It would seem that a problem with one drive could well affect the performance of another, even if they have their own connections. Could this be the cause of the problems that some of you are having, particularly those with more than one drive or device connected? I will be ordering another power supply for the Lacie drive and hopefully it will be fine again. I hope so - I've about 120Gb of files on there!

Message was edited by: Roger Green

Message was edited by: Roger Green

my guess is reinstall snow leopard but i don't know for definite. also i have the opposite problem in which if a file goes on the homescreen, i cannot delete or move it back and its a real pain, making my desktop looked cluttered. any help there?

This did the trick for me. Thanks a lot.

hi folks,
I was having the exact same problem as everyone in this forum. For me, I found a simple solution after WWWAAAAYYYY too much time on the phone with a variety of techies who did not know what to do.

I actually had a techie today tell me to unplug everything (including the power cord) from my computer for 30 seconds. I plugged back in my external HD into another USB port and turned on the power and it actually has been backing up for the last 3 hours (touch wood). I know this sound ridonkulus, but it actually worked for me (and trust me when I say I tried about 18 billion different things on the suggestions of the techies).

Hope that this may help at least some of you.

This just happened to me now!!!

I have a Lacie USB drive with all my music on it. Suddenly the music stopped and I got the "disk not ejected properly" message. This is on my 2006 MacBook Pro and not my new laptop. Is this a drive issue or a computer issue?

Very scary as this is the same drive I use to DJ with. If this happened in the middle of a gig? Not good...

Wow. This is working perfectly for me. Thanks a lot!.

Similar thing on a new iMac with Snow Leopard running Time Machine with a 1T LaCie drive with 2 partitions. Keep getting random messages "disk not ejected properly" until we shut down Time Machine and pulled the drive. Messages then stopped. Waiting for new cable and power supply from LaCie. No promises.

I've had this problem for months, and no way to avoid the ejection except to turn off the drive. So, I tried the unplug/plug in suggested here and it worked... for almost 24 hours. This was much longer than it's ever gone before, so that's better. But, I had one drive go out from this, and am not risking the replacement as well.