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The finder won't stop accessing the external drive

Since updating to Catalina, I can't eject my external drive without relaunching the finder. It is constantly spinning and when I do try to eject it says drive in use by finder. I tried using the disc utility to check the disc but it says that the disk won't unmount. I don't know what else to try.

iMac Pro, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jan 20, 2020 2:08 PM

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Posted on Jan 21, 2020 5:57 AM

I think I may have solved my problem. The relaunching of the finder is a good work around. I relaunched my finder, unmounted the EHD and then went to the disk Utility and repaired the unmounted disk. It took many hours (all night) to make the repairs but in the morning my problem was solved. Don't lose patience when it seems that nothing is happening with the disk repair. Set it and forget it and in the morning the problem may be solved.

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Jan 21, 2020 5:57 AM in response to pylos

I think I may have solved my problem. The relaunching of the finder is a good work around. I relaunched my finder, unmounted the EHD and then went to the disk Utility and repaired the unmounted disk. It took many hours (all night) to make the repairs but in the morning my problem was solved. Don't lose patience when it seems that nothing is happening with the disk repair. Set it and forget it and in the morning the problem may be solved.

Jan 20, 2020 3:26 PM in response to Andrew Pollock2

Log into another user account and see if the problem persists there in Photos. (This tells us if the problem is limited to your user account or is system wide).


Also boot into Safe Mode (Use Safe Mode to isolate issues with your Mac) and test it there. Reboot normally and test again. 

NOTE: Safe Mode boot can take up to 10 minutes as it's doing some system cache cleaning, volume verifying and directory repairing. 




Jan 21, 2020 5:28 AM in response to Andrew Pollock2

I am experiencing the same after upgrading to Catalina (10.15.2 in my case).

This problem seems to have been discussed earlier on these boards:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250724315

No solution was found, but to be honest, I think the Finder relaunch that you mention is a pretty good workaround. People facing this problem should resort to it until a fix comes along.

The finder won't stop accessing the external drive

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