External drive won't properly eject smoothly

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Level 1

4 points

External drive won't properly eject smoothly

"Failed to unmount external disk because it's still in use."

How do I see what is still in use? I can't eject it, Disk Utility won't eject it. I have manually closed everything (no dots under programs), restarted finder, emptied trash, no joy. After exhausting those options I clicked

"Force Eject" where it did eject, but when I plugged it back in and ran disk utility's first aid, it failed to run again. Thanks in advance, Steve.

[Re-titled by Moderator]

MacBook Air (M2, 2023)

Posted on Oct 30, 2023 1:51 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

HWTech

Level 9

56,138 points

Oct 31, 2023 5:51 PM in response to Liquidium

You use the command line and "lsof" command to see which apps or processes have files open on a device or volume. For example if your external drive has a single volume called "External Data Drive", then you should be able to use the following command:

lsof  "/Volumes/External Data Drive"

You can also just type "lsof " with at least one space, then use the Finder to drag & drop the volume onto the open Terminal window which will automatically fill in the correct path.

The first column of the output will have the process which has a hold on that item. Some of the process names may be cryptic.

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Answer 2

Liquidium Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 5, 2023 8:43 PM in response to Liquidium

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

The word "smoothly" describes a finish. The drive won't eject "correctly." It will also eject itself "incorrectly" if the computer goes to sleep. It doesn't eject it "roughly." All I'm saying is, if you going to correct someone, don't make a lateral move; "smoothly" isn't any better than "nicely" and I don't like the way the structure of the title now. Wouldn't care so much except my name is next to it. First they combine like the scroll direction for "mouse" and "track pad," now Apple won't even let me have my own posts?

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External drive won't properly eject smoothly

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