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

Heres a pic of 2 500gig hard drives pulled from macbook Pros I upgraded to 1TB

The problem part is the green SATA bridge card pictured lower left.

(this is a teardown of how most all external USB HD look inside, which is just a SATA card and the HD itself), ...the rest is just a box and USB cable.

not pictured is the USB cable, to the right is a HD dock, I highly recommend people with many hard drives own, without question.

Hi,

I pretty much have the same problem. I had it for quite some time connected with a HUB to my airport and now i have it connected to my mac directly.

If I'm using it, randomly shows the message: "WD My Passport 0740 Media is in use and cannot be powered off."

If I'm not using it, it simply turns itself off. And my time machine cannot connect and do its job.

I've tried installing and desinstalling all the WD SW and it doesn't seem to be working.

Anybody has any idea? It doesn't look like a HW problem as it works with a HUB

I had a 1TB G-Drive USB 3.0 drive that had been working fine on my mid 2011 MacBook Air 13". In mid Dec 2013 I bought a top spec MacBook Pro 15" Retina and the G-Drive would not always show up or self eject. So being I wanted to free up a USB port, I got a 1TB LaCie rugged Thunderbolt drive (the orange rubbery one!) and it also self ejects displaying that error message you get. So, I went back to Apple store and they gave me a brand new MB Pro! But the problem still happens, and worse, if I open my DropBox folder, the desktop re-draws and I cannot view my thousands of files in that folder. The LaCie ejects at the same time.

I am starting to think this may be a Mavericks and DropBox issues, NOT the drives of course or even the MacBook.

A massively serious matter! I Have a £2800 machine that is effectively a brick, being I cannot trust a system that puts my backup drive and cloud storage at risk!

Help!

I omitted to mention: With my former MacBook Air and both recent late 2013 MacBook Pros, when I insert an SD card into the slot, it fails to show up until I repeatedly remove and re-insert it. Is Apple having problems with external media?

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?

To update the basis of the discussion, has anybody running Mavericks had the "improper rejection" problem with an energy saver setting of "enable power nap"?  If so, what are the details?

I am involved in another discussion where I am urging more information about the "energy saver" settings and how they relate to external hard drives.  https://discussions.apple.com/message/24587180#24587180.

I read about SMC reset here.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1703575

Apple directions here,

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

It has worked so far. I would like to find others that have had positive results.

Some background:

3 weeks after Maverick update the improper ejection issue started. I did an Internet Rocovery to a Mini sold with Mountain Lion. Still no good, same ejection issue. After the SMC reset I Carbon Copy Cloned 14GB from HDD 1 to an external Seagate Freeagent Desk for Mac, no trouble. When I plugged in a second drive to the mini it was not recognized, I unplugged and am now "drag and drop" downloading 116GB from finder window to external Seagate Backup Plus for Mac.

What say you world of lost backups and grinding teeth.

Good download with the drag and drop.

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

/Library isn't hidden. Only the Library in your user directory is hidden. These files are in your /Library. You might also have a FUSE related preference pane in System Preferences.

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.