Disk not ejected properly

Personally I think a problem like that is unlikely to be anything related to the system at all, but simply a case of a hard drive failing. Hard drives are always prone to failing because they are mechanical devices with extremely fine tolerances in them - that's why one is exhorted to Backup, Backup, Backup, and why Time Machine is baked into MacOS X so deeply.

If you don't have a backup of the contents of the drive then you could choose to go through the process of trying to extract the data. The first step that many use for this is to put the bare drive into a ziplock bag with a silica gel sachet then put it into the freezer for about ten hours or so. Then try connecting up the drive again.

If it does work at this stage copy all the data off as quickly as possible onto another drive. If this fails at some point (generally as the hard drive warms up through use), go through the freezing cycle again. You can often get most if not all the data off a failed drive this way. I have personally found this to be very successful in many cases of "failed drives".

If the above does not work there are further steps one can go through - google for them - but eventually if the data is invaluable, it will be necessary to go to a drive recovery company who will charge a fortune to recover the data.

Please note that I do not suggest that the above will definitely work for you, although it has for me, and I relate my experiences without any guarantee or liabaility whatsoever for the consequences. You take the above steps entirely at your own risk if you choose to do so.

If you do get your data back then after that you should backup, bakup and backup again to ensure that you do not lose your data.

One other point to reiterate is that it is unlikely that this is related to the problem that others have commented on in this thread, and also the fact that it is a Seagate drive is not likely to be significant - drives of all makes can and do fail at any time.

I have an ioSafe Rugged Portable Firewire and another that is USB. Never had an issue with the Firewire when my Mac went into sleep mode but did with the USB model. These have no power supply on their own as they use Bus power from the ports itself. I found a solution to my problem but it may or may not work for all. I plugged the USB model into a USB powered hub and that got rid of the "not ejected properly" message even after waking from sleep mode. I replied to your post as I hope it helps you and others.

This is an isue I've been trying to solve for years! It has been something that has annoyed me in some shape or frorm since 10.5, when I got my first Mac. I find it hard to believe that Apple does not want to solve this problem.

I use a USB drive for my Time Machine backups, and every time my machine goes to sleep, this message appears when the machine wakes up.

Please guys fix this annoying problem!! It cant be that hard, surely?

Don't use a USB RAID drive. I've lost 2 sets of RAID drives because of this costing me over $400.00 to replace. One of the drives in the RAID array will go off line first and the other one this thinks it has failed and gets confused resulting in the RAID config being destroyed and neither drive can be accessed. Disk Utility just gives up and wont fix either drive. BEWARE.

Did you try to uncheck the box "put hard drives to sleep when possible" and further "display sleep" option to "never" in the OS energy saver setting?

I have an iMac21,5" mid 2011 and a GRaid w TBolt where i store my images. And i have an Eizoscreen as my main screen, with the iMacscreen as no2. I also had my Lightroomcatalog on this disk.

Some weeks ago i startet to get the message you guys have got (the disk was not ejected properly) after my screen had gone black. And i also got this messages:

"Lightroom encountered an error when reading from its preview and needs to quit". And another message: "An internal error has occured" and " ...Fatal_SQLite-Transient_error:Database:/Volumes (...my harddiskname...) Error:disk I/O error:SQL:Selectid_localFROM AgLibraryCollectionWHEREid-local=?;"

Afterwards i was forced to quit Lightroom. And i also had to press the powerbutton to shut down the machine.

So i moved the lightroomcatalog to an internal disk and the Lightroom-errormessages disappeared.

But i still got the message that the disk was not ejected properly etc.

Why do i still get this message "The disk was not ejected properly"? I have now disconnected the Eizoscreen from my system, and now the GRaid-disk is connected directly to my iMac. Still i got the message. But after I clicked "OK" the disk is still there and in Finder. Have ordered a new Thunderbolt-cable, but don´t know if it will help.

Nearly every time I connect my 'Freecom Tough Drive 3.0 1TB' to my MacBook Air it disconnects immediately.

I get the message ‘Disk not ejected properly – Eject disk “…” before disconnecting or tuning it off.’

In my case it is not related to the computer going to sleep and the disk does not disconnect on other devices. Could this be another problem than in the case of machines going to sleep and then disconnect?

This might be not a solution but worked for me. I just unplugged the drive left it alone for 10 mins. Restarted MAC and put the drive in a different USB port and BOOM it worked.

Same here. Drive gets disconnected accidentally and wouldn't read through USB after that no matter what you do and/or reset, giving that silly message again and again nonstop. I also have certain USB cables that do that (while they don't do it on any of my pc computers). Resulted in my HD failure eventually for some reason computer wouldn't start at all after disconnecting the external drive via safe mode, just died. Apple software in this case is a complete PoS, drive reads in Windows 7 on my pc with no problems, even accidental disconnects don't cause anything like that besides ONE warning message. It's quite obvously caused by faulty programming on Apple side (or something different with their USB port is my other guess - not a hardware guy) yet they haven't done anything about it for years now, first encountered this in 2009, still going on with new OS and not fixed despite numerous complaints and forums about this issue.

I've replaced OS X, cables, hard drive, back up disk drive and still have the same problem.

The replaced parts work fine on PC's at work. No problems on PC's.

Apple service gave up on it.

I AM CONVINCED IT IS IN THE OPERATING SYSTEM!

Possibly the disk drives don't spool up fast enough for the OS.

But it sometimes happens right out of the blue in the middle of a session.

While not happy about it I have learned to live with it over the past 4 years.

Norm

I agree - it must be an OS problem, although it is possible it is contributed to by a physical hardware problem. Personally I have as a a result of this problem finally given up trying to use MacOS X server for file serving.

The Mac Mini I use as a server runs totally solidly for months at a time performing all of its different tasks. The only one that screws up is file serving, and the only reason for this is that the USB mirrored RAID enclosure disconnects from the Mac. When this happens the shared volumes (understandably) disconnect from the connected clients.

If I take a look at the server the drives will appear to be mounted OK, but the dreaded "Disk not ejected properly" dialog shows that the connection must have been broken momentarily, and this is all it takes for the shared volumes to drop out and disconnect from the clients.

This is so pathetic - it means that an otherwise stable server product is just unsuitable for use. Apple compound the problem by the ridiculous omission of any model which has the ability to have additional drives installed in it in a suitable way for use as a server. There are now tons of great NAS drives around that fulfil the purpose of file serving (and many other functions) admirably - maybe I was just stupid to think that a Mac could ever be suitable for that purpose.

Finally I am now convinced that this is an OS issue rather than a hardware problem. Like Norman Jackson I now believe that it is an issue which has been in the OS for years and never been identified. It may be a timing issue rather than a bug as such, but certainly I can't see any indication in any log of the problem even occurring - the momentary disconnection happens but no fault seems to be logged. Maybe this is why it hasn't been fixed?

I have to say that my server is still running Snow Leopard as the Mac Mini is not new enough for anything later, and I don't want to upgrade because of this issue. Instead I have bought a couple of Synology drives (one double mirrored DS214 and one single DS114 for scheduled incremental backup from the other) and they are superb.

A reason that I am pretty certain this issue has not been resolved is that I get USB drive disconnects all the time on my iMac running Mavericks, so if I did update to Mavericks server I think the problem is likely to be even worse.

Are you using Western Digital hard drives? I had this problem with the WD drives until I disabled all of the WD drivers and software. Now I don't have the problem. Before that this problem destroyed 2 sets of RAID drives.

WD sent the email out to registered customers regarding Mavericks compatibility. This is not limited just to Mavericks since I was running Lion and had the same problem. I'm still on Lions and just deleting the WD SW solved the problem.

Dear WD Registered Customer,

As we previously announced, Western Digital received reports of Western Digital and other external HDD products experiencing data loss when updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9). Our investigation to date has found that for a small percentage of customers that have the WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager and/or WD SmartWare software applications installed on their Mac, there can be cases of a repartition and reformat of their Direct Attached Storage (DAS) devices without customer acknowledgement which can result in data loss. We have an updated version of the software that fixes this issue. We strongly recommend that you install this updated software. Please contact our service and support team with any questions.

Below are links to download the software:

WD Drive Manager for Mac Version 3.1.0.

WD SmartWare Version 1.3.6 for Mac 10.5-10.9.

Sincerely,

Western Digital

Good luck.

I am not using WD drives with the server. The drives in the twin drive USB RAID 1 enclosure are Seagate.

Besides this, I don't think the WD software installs any drivers. It probably updates firmware on the drives, although the notes you attach are not at all clear on that front.

I've got that error message showing since today and it looks like a loose connection with the disk. I've got WD USB disk drive. That is really annoying.

I left some "friends" to use my iMac 10.6.8 and they could have unexpectedly triggered the issue by leaning on the disk/dropping it. But looking at it, it seems fine.

I've unplugged/replugged the cable on both ends, USB (iMac) and miniUSB and the issue stopped for some time; until I tried to manipulate again the disk physically again.

I will monitor this issue for a few days and contact WD support if that persist.