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I have 10.6.8 on MacBook Pro. When I try to eject my 1TB external hard drive, I get the error message “one or more programs may be using it.” When I tried to eject it from Utilities, it said that “it could not be unmounted.” What’s the safest way to unmount it? Can I just shut down my laptop and then turn off the external hard drive after the computer is shut down?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
lyartetc wrote:
When I try to eject my 1TB external hard drive, I get the error message “one or more programs may be using it.” When I tried to eject it from Utilities
You mean Disk Utility.
Can I just shut down my laptop and then turn off the external hard drive after the computer is shut down?
Yes, but if this happens more than once or twice, it's not very practical, is it? You need to find out which app still wants the drive. The way to do this is in Terminal with lsof. Say your 1TB drive's name is ExternalDisk. When you get this message, you should go into Terminal and do
$ lsof | grep ExternalDisk
($ is the prompt; this is case-sensitive, so make sure you capitalise the drive's name correctly).
After a little while, you should get one or more lines listing what files are still open on the 1TB drive. The first word in each line is the app using the open file.
This is the only thing that would work for me! Thank you so much!
What's the safest way...force eject an external hard drive?
