Automatically eject all partitions-Catalina

> I didn't want to wait for them to mount and then delete.

You can't do that via AppleScript.

Any AppleScript can only take place after the drive has already been mounted.

If you want to prevent the volumes from mounting in the first place, you likely need to get 'under the hood' and probably play with something like /etc/fstab to tell the mount subsystem to not automatically mount the volume(s).

Something like:

UUID=ABCDEF01-79F7-33FF-BE85-E1D3ABD3EDEA none hfs rw,noauto

Where the first field lists the UUID of the volume in question - you can get this via diskutil info in Terminal.app. The middle two fields are largely irrelevant in this case, but the 'rw, noauto' at the end indicates it's a read/write device, but not to automount the volume.

There is no GUI approach to managing this that I'm aware of.

AppleScript will allow you to determine, or exclude, locally (USB) mounted, or NAS mounted drives, and then eject them.

-- in this example, "T M" is the name of the Time Machine drive which is not to be ejected
set excluded to {"home", "net", "T M"}

tell application "Finder"
	set alist to (every disk whose ejectable is true or local volume is false and excluded does not contain its name)
	log alist
	(*
	repeat with adrive in alist
		eject adrive
	end repeat
	*)
end tell

I have excluded my Time Machine drive in the above example. Otherwise, a mounted USB SSD, and a Synology NAS network share mounted to my Desktop are detected, and ejected. There is an AppleScript block comment around the ejection repeat block in the above code, because the first time the code is run, you should determine what the list alist contains for your usage.

Launch the Script Editor from Dock : Launchpad : Other : Script Editor. On the bottom of the Script Editor, you will see three icons:

Click the right-most icon, and this will open a display area whose heading will be Result, Messages, Events, and Replies. By clicking Replies, you can see the results of the AppleScript running and log command output.

Copy and paste the above AppleScript into the Script Editor, Click the hammer (compile) button, and then the run button. It is likely that when you uncomment the repeat block that you will see error number 0 following each eject. This is normal.



APPLEAL wrote:

Is there an AppleScript/Automator way to automatically eject all partitions of an external drive after being attached to a mac. Ideally, I would like to plug in the drive and walk away and the process would start, and would find none of the partitions mounted after a certain period of time.

Thanks

Well, I do know if you hold the option key when ejecting—it unmounts all partitions.