External Hard Drive Randomly Ejects From MacBook Pro - "The Disk Was Not Ejected Properly"

Do you have a good copy of TimeMachine on a external HD that works. If so reinstall Mavericks.

Also have heard that you should reformat any external HD's with Disk Utlity before attepting to do any backups with Mavericks. Do not use the software supplied by the HD's manafucture unless it has been updated to handle Mavericks.

A possible fix kluge!

I have also had this problem with multiple machines running different osx from 10.6 up, on mac mini, mac pro, and new macbook air. The most recent flash that I have the problem on is a PNY 16gb thumb flash (the low profile one). My machines have time machine off and do not have disc shutdown on in power saving system preferences.

My problem manifests with a lengthy osx warning window with red stop sign, telling me to eject the disc properly before removing it, after which the flash drive does not appear in the finder drive list.

Although one user at innervision.com postulated that his problem was due to an auto sleeo mode on his seagate flash drive, and fixed his problem by installing a new driver for the seagate product, that is not the cause of my problem. PNY verified that their flash drives do not have that auto sleep mode on drive or in driver.

Reasoning that osx is having a usb timeout on the drive, because the drive is not being written to constantly, or there is some hardware usb issue causing flash/usb driver timeout periodically, or an error in the Apple sleep power saving preferences panel, I suggest the following, a script to touch a file on the flash drive every few minutes. If your flash drive is Foo, the script, called noeject

#!/bin/csh- f

while (1)

touch /volumes/Foo/nosleep

sleep 300

end

Then

chmod 777 noeject and run it. All the script does is touch a file on Foo, sleep for 5 minutes, and repeat.

Doing this, my drive hasn't barfed in several hours, whereas before, it would die every ten minutes. I make no warranty as to whether this will work for you, of course.

Oh, it'd be cool if Apple would look into this, and not point fingers, so that it could fix its own problem, or come up with a list of working external USB devices, letting manufacturers know what spec they need to follow. That's insanely great. Excuses aren't.

LaCie support recently advised me that "Apple has recently acknowledged problems within current versions of Mac OS X that can cause external drives to become improperly ejected during system sleep. Patches from Apple to correct these issues are forthcoming." We shall see ............

I was having a similar issue with the G-Tech Thunderbolt Drive, and then the Buffalo Networks Thunderbolt drive and seem to have tracked it down to remnants of MacFUSE, OSXFUSE, and prlufs.fs (Parallels 8 FS Component that has its own FUSE component) in /Library/Filesystems. Once I removed any trace of MacFUSE and OSXFUSE from my MacBookPro11,3, my Thunderbolt drive stopped spontaneously unmounting/mounting.

Do you have any of these Filesystems plugins?

I switched from a 2009 MBP to a 2012 MBA. The MBA randomly ejects external drives whenever it feels likle it! It could be any drive, it could be all of them at once. And they're from various manufacturers, so I can't find a common thread.

I think that I'm going to switch back to my MBP for awhile and see if the same issue pops up there. Mavericks, maybe?

In the meantime, any ideas?

As above:

"I was having a similar issue with the G-Tech Thunderbolt Drive, and then the Buffalo Networks Thunderbolt drive and seem to have tracked it down to remnants of MacFUSE, OSXFUSE, and prlufs.fs (Parallels 8 FS Component that has its own FUSE component) in /Library/Filesystems. Once I removed any trace of MacFUSE and OSXFUSE from my MacBookPro11,3, my Thunderbolt drive stopped spontaneously unmounting/mounting.

Do you have any of these Filesystems plugins?"

Chris,

Thanks a lot for the help. I don't recall ever having any of those applications. I'll check in the library. How do I get into the library now in Mavericks? There's a key I should hold down but I can't recall. (I swear I'm fried from two and a half months of this.)

Frank

MBP 5,5

This might help some of the other guys having the same issue.

I am a records producer working on a lot of films in SA. I tried copying a large amount of files to my external HDD, I use a HDD dock vecause its just easier plugging drives in and out as they get full or as I want to use them.

Ive been having this issue on all 3 the last macbooks that I have bought, but as soon as I plug it into a machine that runs windows it works with no issues. I then went down to capetown to work a film and in the studio they had a Mac that was about 6 years old, it then worked without any issues aswell.

None of these answers you guys gave helped me. I started researching USB technology and how it works, I then found out that from different manufacturers you get different types of USB cables, different quality and different speeds, I never knew that, I then went and bought a new cable from my local PC shop. All excited I plugged it in and I still had the same issue.

After giving up, I had a recording session with a local band, realising that my USB Audio interface started doing the same thing, but in my DAW it said that my cable does not match my transfer rate for the audio recording, on my OS it said that my device was not ejected properly.

I went back to my local PC Store and bought myself a high quality USB Cable and all my issues where resolved, so it might be that the cable you are using might be of poor quality, these companies that make external hardrives and so on mistly buy these cables from china and try and do it as cheap as possible, the results are a batch of cables that are faulty or just poor quality.

Unfortunatly thats how it goes and then we end up spending months to try and fix it. Not even core support (Apple guys in SA) or Technical help at my local iStore could help me. But anyway its all fixed.

Hi, I have a similar problem of the Disk not Ejected correctly & File copy stopping intermittently after Operating System Upgrade.

My File Copies are Long, at least a minimum of 30 minutes!

I have tried different external hard disks "HDs" and the problem still remains the same.

I am trying the Energy Saving Option where you can un-check the "Put Hard Disks to Sleep When Possible and will let you know.

Changing HDs not helping points to Op Sys or related issues rather than HD issues, in my opinion anyway.

Wish me luck!

I just got my Wd hard drive 2tb today and copied movies over to it and then the message came up saying it wasn't ejected properly. So I deleted the 2 applications you install and now it works perfectly.

Turn off Spotlight! Apparently, Spotlight must hammer the external drive and cause all kinds of problems. I turned off Spotlight for the external drive (added to the Privacy tab) and just transferred 34GB no problem.

Unfortunately this hasn't worked for me. Anyone have any other suggestions?

I have just had this problem since the 19th and I don't think anything has changed on my computer. Late 2013 3.5GHX Intel core i7 24dm RAM OSX 10.10.1 bought 6 months ago. Neither of my two Maxtor Desktop Basic 1.5 and 2 Tb external USB HDD will stay connected. I have bought new power supplies with uprated 5amp power output as I thought it could be the power supplies but it's not made any difference. Strange that both failed to stay connected at the same time. One is my time machine the other for large seldom used files

This problem seems to persist, so I'll throw in my 2¢

I have 4 externals attached to my Mac mini. 2 directly into the Mac, 2 into a hub.
The two connected to the Mac are a WD 640Gb and a Verbatim 1TB.

The two connected via the hub are a Seagate 1Tb and a Iomega 1Tb (the latter drive is manufactured by Samsung).

I have only one drive that has this self-ejecting problem. The Iomega. The others are fine. The Iomega WAS fine until about 3 weeks ago. I initially thought that it was something to do with upgrading to OSX 10.10 Yosemite but from the comments above/below that doesn't seem to hold.

The Verbatim and WD are both 3+ years old. The Iomega, 2 years old and the Seagate 1 year. The WD has been running almost constantly since it was installed. The other 3 are mounted when needed but the Iomega is used the second most.

I have no external software controlling these drives, only Mac's normal mount point. So I think that those that are saying it's the WD software are, unfortunately, probably wrong.

I have changed cables, PSUs (where possible) and plugged the drive into the Mac directly. I noted that the drive seems to play up toward the end of the day when it has been on for a number of hours. I have physically moved the drive thinking it may be a heat issue.

I have also noted that the drive behaves more erratically when there are a number of apps and processes running. Interestingly it has the most problems when I bring Skype to the front. I think that is coincidental but I can't explain why the drive should be more erratic when using skype.

The Iomega continues with it's self ejecting.

My gut instinct makes me think that it's a power issue, but I'm no techie.

Reading this thread there seem to be a few different makes of drive affected from various flavours of Mac OSX on various models of Macs.

I am inclined to think that it is a Mac issue not the drive.

I will be buying a new drive this weekend. The Iomega is my media drive and I'd hate to lose all my films, the more important music is backed up to the Seagate ;-)

Yes I have googled.

My Mac

Model Name:Mac mini (Mac mini 2011)

Model Identifier:Macmini5,1

Processor Name:Intel Core i5

Processor Speed:2,3 GHz

OSX 10.10.1

Below are some details of the Iomega drive. Please note that the other drives have the same spec as below, save for the manufacturers, BSD name, and that which you'd expect to be different for the differing drives.

Iomega 1Tb external drive (Samsung)

Available: 375,88 GB (375.881.838.592 bytes)

Capacity: 999,86 GB (999.860.912.128 bytes)

Mount Point: /Volumes/IOMEGA-1TB

File System: Journaled HFS+

Writable: Yes

Ignore Ownership: Yes

BSD Name: disk3s2

Physical Drive:

Media Name: SAMSUNG HD105SI Media

Protocol: USB

Internal: No

Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)

S.M.A.R.T. Status: Not Supported

I'm just shooting from the hip like everyone else here; I've not ever had a problem with the following hardware:

Transcend USB 3.0 Five USB Hub

WD My Book Studio 2TB Drive

Seagate Backup Plus 4TB Drive

My main computer is a Early 2013 MacBook Pro 15" Retina, i7 2.7 / 16gb RAM

Never a problem. The ONLY time they've unmounted improperly is when we experience a power failure, even a quick drop of power that just lasts less than a second.

I've had older hardware that would unmount fairly frequently on Windows machines, but never gave it much thought; it was Windows. I did have some older externals on an older Mac that didn't like to stay mounted; I bought newer devices and everything worked. This leads me to think that these issues are possibly hardware compatibility issues on the aftermarket manufacturers' end. Whether it be hubs, or external drives. I bought everything 'latest and greatest' new with this latest Mac and like I'd said, I've had ZERO issues. Just my two cents.

"Utilities - Disk Uitilities - Select Macintosh HD - First Aid - Repair Disk Permissions"

This worked for me. Solved the problem of a 3TB Western Digital drive mounted on a Voyager that kept ejecting on my MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2008) 10.10.4