Q: Disk Drive ejecting itself

I have solved the spontaneous eject on my iMac.

I have had a similar problem since updating from Snow Leopard 10.6.4. I use a 1.5TB Samsung Story attached via USB to my 27" i7 iMac solely for Time Machine back ups. Prior to the update, backups have been performed flawlessly, and when the computer sleeps, it plays nicely with not only the attached drive but also 2 network mounts from another iMac.

Post the update, I noticed that when I wake the iMac from sleep, it reports that the USB disk has been unplugged without proper ejecting. I get Time Machine errors if a backup was in progress at sleep time. The only way to remount the disk is by shutting it down and powering up again. In addition, the two network mounts would also be unmounted, which never happened before the update.

Updating from 10.6.5 to 10.6.6 did not solve the problem. However, I also noticed that my Drobo attached to an older iMac via USB, which was also had OSX updates simultaneously with the 27" iMac had no such problem, unlike some reports in this thread.

So I rebooted my iMac, launched Disk Utility and did a repair on the disk (not a permissions repair, but a repair - find the button to the right of the dialog box). This process took about 2 hours, although there was nothing in the logs that showed any serious errors. After the repair, I remounted the USB drive and everything seems to be back to normal. Even the network mounts are behaving properly.

I hope this helps someone else with their USB drive spontaneously ejecting on sleep.

Message was edited by: Hard Light to clarify that it wasn't a permissions repair but a disk repair.

Same here with USB 'universal' card reader - gets ejected randomly for various types of cards (CF and SD). My workaround is to connect the camera directly, but would rather have the system just functioning.

I've been having these same problems with both powered and non-powered usb external drives ever since I updated to snow leopard, which I only did so I could have access the App Store. I could kick myself for opting for the upgrade now. This is an obvious glitch in the snow leopard operating system and one would think people from Apple would be monitoring these discussion forums and see the glaring problem they have instead of playing foosball and sipping coffee all day up in Cupertino.

The only fortunate thing is it hasn't impacted my time machine backup to my WD T1. If that happens, this will be my last mac. I don't even want to think about going in and doing disk repairs, especially when I know IT IS NOT THE DISK THAT NEEDS REPAIR.

C'mon Apple...Get on the stick and fix this problem with snow leopard. You are already forcing leopard and tiger users to upgrade to this 10.6.6 just so they can spend more money in the app store and that will mean you will have a whole lot of dissatisfied mac owners if you don't fix the problem soon.

Further to my previous comment, since using a Y-cable to provide extra power to the external drive I've not had any re-occurrences of the disk ejecting. I have since moved to using a powered USB hub and this too has worked flawlessly.

I tried "repairing" my FireWire disk using Disk Utility as suggested above by Kiraku and Hard Light, but my disk is still occasionally ejecting itself when I wake my MacBook Pro from sleep.

I want to emphasize that my ejection problem only happens when I wake my Mac up, and I assume that this might be a significant clue to the problem, at least for my own particular case.

Any ideas on that?

Message was edited by: onemac to change what version of OS I have

Add me to the list too! I have a newer iMac and my Drobo worked flawlessly via USB under 10.6.4. 10.6.5. started the issue and 10.6.6 did not resolve it. Still spontaneously dropping off the desktop. Have tried disk repair, various cables and of course, no usb hub. Flawless performance via Firewire but I need it to work on usb. Data Robotics has many trouble tickets on this and says Apple is aware of this and needs to make a fix. Already lost my iPhoto library as one time the disk dismounted with iPhoto open and it corrupted the library. Cannot rebuild...will have to do a restore from an older version and add to it.

I'm having a similar problem.

New, 1TB Samsung internal SATA drive randomly unmounts. Does not appear in Disk Utility -- have to reboot to remount.

Here's what I've tried:

• Wiped and reformatted, GUID HFS+
• Moved to different internal bay
• Reset SMC
• Tested drive with 3 different utilities, found no problems

This drive is used for iTunes and iPhoto libraries.

System is running 10.6.6 on a Quad-core Mac Pro. I keep it very clean....

I notice there are a lot of complaints about this same problem occurring with external drives. I doubt it has anything to do with faulty drives or cables or TimeMachine. Is this a problem with the OS?

Apple, please fix this!

Add me to the list. Getting the same error message here.

It only seems to be a problem with external hard drives. My portable was ejected just a few days ago when I went to transfer some files. The external hd ejects too - and it's the the one that really matters - as it's used for Time Machine. I even bought a new hard drive (iomega) thinking the old one (LaCie) was on its last legs. Nothing works so far. It just keeps ejecting whenever it wants to.

This is a really serious problem. Why isn't Apple on top of this?

This is happening to me too. Get on this **** apple this is pathetic! I swear to god little stuff like this is making me feel like i'm dealing with microsoft.

This isn't a little problem. Given the simple fact that, if you want to access the mac app store, you MUST upgrade to Snow Leopard. BTW, none of these external hard drive problems were a problem with Leopard. Now they are. Apple appears it's own version of Vista here with Snow Leopard, they don't seem to be interested to be the least bit interested in their customer's plight, EVEN WHEN ITS POSTED ON THEIR OWN **** WEBSITE

I have seen every voodoo remedy going on here in this forum to rectify "the problem". It is NOT with your external drives, or the connections of those drives. IT IS WITH THE SNOW LEOPARD OPERATING SYSTEM.

And for the love of me, I cannot find an easy way to contact Apple online and have them at least look at the problem THAT DOESN'T COST ME MONEY. But I am sure, when apple users start having their precious time machine backup drives crash and fail, you will start seeing at least some good ole' american lawsuits cropping up. It's coming, especially now that they got their money machine app store running (again, only IF you...like I...were stupid enough to upgrade to Steve's SnowJob).

Yep - me too. It was fine on Leopard, I recently updated to Snow Leopard and now it's happening daily. It seems to happen more often when I access it from a network (ATV, other computer etc...)

Console Log

2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel IOUSBMassStorageClass[0x92a5c00]: The device is still unresponsive after 6 consecutive USB Device Resets; it will be terminated.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel 0 [Level 3] [ReadUID 0] [Facility com.apple.system.fs] [DevNode /dev/disk1s3] [MountPt /Volumes/Backup] [Path /Volumes/Backup/music/Movies/movie.m4v] [FSLogMsgID 1137485534] [FSLogMsgOrder Last]
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel jnl: disk1s3: dojnlio: strategy err 0x6
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel jnl: disk1s3: end_transaction: only wrote 0 of 40960 bytes to the journal!
2/9/11 10:10:58 PM kernel jnl: disk1s3: close: journal 0x8799e04, is invalid. aborting outstanding transactions

ive tried almost all suggestions on here. ive tried 4 different drives. 3 usb and 1 firewire.
starts to back up and fails within a minute consistently after it backed up about 200+ gigs no problem

2/10/11 6:47:33 PM com.apple.backupd[51143] Backing up to: /Volumes/backup/Backups.backupdb
2/10/11 6:47:34 PM com.apple.backupd[51143] No pre-backup thinning needed: 8.11 GB requested (including padding), 690.78 GB available
2/10/11 6:47:46 PM com.apple.backupd[51143] Copied 10 files (13.5 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel IOUSBMassStorageClass[0xffffff8018d04400]: The device is still unresponsive after 6 consecutive USB Device Resets; it will be terminated.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: device/channel is not attached.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel jnl: disk1s3: dojnlio: strategy err 0x6
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel jnl: disk1s3: writejournalheader: error writing the journal header!
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel jnl: disk1s3: dojnlio: strategy err 0x6
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel jnl: disk1s3: end_transaction: only wrote 0 of 160256 bytes to the journal!
2/10/11 6:47:50 PM kernel disk1s3: media is not present.

i believe i may have found a temporary fix for this issue.. i went into spotlight preferences and added my entire hard drive to the privacy list ie will not index stuff and i also unchecked all the options for safe measure.. since then its backed up a few times over night!

oh sorry.. i also rebooted after changing the options