Cannot unmount external drive

SVO wrote:

There was a 12-page thread on this that ended in May- I have the same problem now in September- any solutions?

I use the Terminal.app copy and paste:

diskutil umount 

notice the trailing blank space, now drag & drop your external drive directly onto the terminal window to complete the path..use the enter\return key to proceed.

ex only:

MacBook-Pro ~ % diskutil umount /Volumes/Install\ macOS\ Monterey

Volume Install macOS Monterey on disk2s2 unmounted

MacBook-Pro ~ %

Let me see if I understand: you have one drive connected, quit all applications except Disk Utility, click to Unmount.

What then, exactly?

Do you get any error message?

Post a screenshot if possible.

Sounds like the same issue I frequently have with one of my drives. Good luck finding a solution that works permanently, coz I’ve never found one, and the 12 page thread that can’t solve it tells me that there isn’t a solution coming soon. I have to log out, then back in again, before I can disconnect my one. When you’re logging out (or restarting/shutting down) it may be better if you uncheck the option to reopen windows when you log back in, to prevent whatever is allegedly using from hijacking it again.

That thread is all over the place - some drives that did not mount, some that worked very slowly, etc.

The present situation mentions a drive that does not unmount, and occurs six versions of Monterey later.

It is not at all clear that it's "the same problem".

I still haven't got an answer as to what exactly happens - spinning wheel? error message? the drive stays there?

FWIW, I have used over dozen different drives, including hard drives, SD cards, thumb drives and SSD, connected directly or through a dock to my MBP running Monterey, from 12.0.1 to 12.6 and I have never encountered this. Drives were HFS extended, FAT32, ExFat, APFS. Some have multiple partitions.

I am not saying that there is no issue, mind you, but that since a few users have problems, it does not necessarily mean that all have, and that there is a bug.

We are all users volunteering our time and experience trying to add each other.

The more information, the better, so we can come to a solution.

For example, you say you have problems with one of your drives. What is different from other drives that do not have a problem?

Thanks for the Terminal tip... really thought it was going to work, but failed (repeatedly) to unmount. Logged out and back in, gave it another try and it worked first go. I've read, more than once, people claiming it is an issue with spotlight, but I've never seen anything explaining how to address it.

Perhaps, if the User cares to share a link to this End of May 20? , we can follow what the user is actually referring to and experiencing on this computer

We are not mind readers 😔

You need to give some information. What happens when you try to unmount? Any error message?

Does this happen with just one specific drive? Any applications that could be using the drive at the time?

All yours, can not make sense