My external hard drive won't eject from Disk Utility but it ejects from Finder. I tried hitting Cmd+E and clicking the triangle to eject the hard drive but it won't eject. How do I force eject it?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.6
Is it safe to eject the external storage at this point?
The whole point behind safe to eject is macOS mounts the drives with the write cache enabled. That means it may cache some of the data while it writes the rest. If you eject before the cache is written out, you could lose that data. On a spinning hard drive you could possibly damage the platter, but probably not.
It would be rare that it would still be writing cached data more than a few minutes after it looks like it has finished writing in the Finder. The unsafe eject message doesn't mean it was still writing, just that it could have been. It has no idea--if it could know, it wouldn't eject the disk until it was ready.
So, by now, it should be safe to eject, even if you just pulled the USB cable and didn't unmount it.
Is it safe to eject the external storage at this point?
The whole point behind safe to eject is macOS mounts the drives with the write cache enabled. That means it may cache some of the data while it writes the rest. If you eject before the cache is written out, you could lose that data. On a spinning hard drive you could possibly damage the platter, but probably not.
It would be rare that it would still be writing cached data more than a few minutes after it looks like it has finished writing in the Finder. The unsafe eject message doesn't mean it was still writing, just that it could have been. It has no idea--if it could know, it wouldn't eject the disk until it was ready.
So, by now, it should be safe to eject, even if you just pulled the USB cable and didn't unmount it.
DCarlson93 wrote:
I attached the wrong picture. I was seeing drives in Disk Utility but not in Finder. I logged out and back in and the drives were still there but showed the 'missing icon' icon instead of a drive icon.
If you can eject from Finder— then I do not see the issue...(?)
If you can not unmount from Finder or the external continues to remount itself,
you can from the Terminal.app copy and paste:
diskutil umount
notice the trailing blank space...you can drag & drop your external drive from the Desktop to the Terminal window to complete the path; it will read something similar to diskutil umount /Volumes/Untitled .
enter/return to proceed to execute the command-line.
Terminal User Guide for Mac - Apple Support
I’m confused by the screenshot. It doesn’t show any external drives?
Disk Utility doesn’t really “eject” the drive. It unmounts from the file system, but the drive can be mounted again. In the Finder, when ejected, you cannot mount it again from the Finder.
Does Disk Utility show any errors?
I attached the wrong picture. I was seeing drives in Disk Utility but not in Finder. I logged out and back in and the drives were still there but showed the 'missing icon' icon instead of a drive icon.
Thank you for that. I guess what I was trying to say is that I was worried because the container looked like it was unmounted in Finder but not in Disk Utility no matter how many times i clicked the up eject triangle or hit cmd+e.
I ran diskutil umount disk2 and got a message disk2 was already unmounted or it has a partitioning scheme so use "diskutil unmountDisk" instead. I ran unmount and got the same message.
Is it safe to eject the external storage at this point?
Thank you.
Can eject from Finder but can't eject from Disk Utility?