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**** thumb drive refuses to eject

Whenever I eject a thumb drive or external hard drive, I get an error "The drive is in use. Try quitting some applications and try again."


Believe me, I've tried this every possible way. Quitting applications NEVER makes a difference. I'll strip down to bare Finder, and still the message will always persist. I'm guessing a cold shutdown would work, but that's just not reasonable. I should be able to eject a drive.


I have suspected a virus checker is camping the drive, but the checker will tell me when it has finished scanning the drive, and even after that, it still won't eject. I've also tried going into Activity Monitor and killing daemons that appear related to virus or backup, and that sometimes works.


I need "reliable". This is a Mac and that is my expectation. I can forgive Apple a bad third-party app/daemon, but I can't forgive Apple's refusing to positively identify the app or daemon responsible. How do I tell myself?


Alternately, what's the downside if I just rip the **** thing out and click off the warning message?

Posted on Jul 9, 2011 3:34 AM

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3 replies

Jul 9, 2011 6:20 AM in response to Wolf Harper

If you do a Force Quit keyboard command (Option + Command + Esc) does it show any apps open? Are there any (recently opened) apps on the Thumb Drive?


If you have the problem where you can’t empty the trash or eject a disk because something is preventing you? Usually the reason is because some application has a file open, and thus you can’t get rid of the disk or trash the file. Then use What’s Keeping Me! What’s Keeping Me will identify the application that is preventing you from accomplishing your task. You can then use What's Keeping Me to quit, relaunch, or kill the problem application so you can get on with your business.

http://www.hamsoftengineering.com/products/wkm/wkm.html


 Cheers, Tom 😉

Jul 9, 2011 9:25 AM in response to Wolf Harper

I've tried all that stuff. It's not an app running from the Finder. There's nothing in alt-tab or cmd-option-esc.

I've also used 'lsof', a handy Unix utility which is baked into OS X, and that gives nothing.

I have also tried the "What's Keeping Me" app, and it comes up with nothing either.

I have also tried running "What's Keeping Me" with the administrator/root option turned on.

It is not a normal application. I'm not a dumb user like that 🙂 It's a recurring problem I've done a lot to troubleshoot but I have hit a dead end.

**** thumb drive refuses to eject

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