Why am I getting a disk not ejected properly message?

I have emailed David Pogue (early today) and received a brief response.

Replied and gave him the gist of what is being discussed with a bit more specific info' about my troubles.

Excellent.

I'd never heard of him until now but overlooking his credentials I might pop him an e-mail myself in a peverse kind of 'get to the man that might be able to get to the man' kind of move.

I've already been down the official submit error report using Apple's pre-defined channels and that particular mission quickly disappeared into outer space.

It's annoying the s h it out of me.

Hey Bruce I wouldn't have suspected you were in Blighty with a surname like that 😉

way to go

I'm having this issue on two different Macs; a 2013 Mac Pro running Mavericks and a 2013 MacBook Air running Mountain Lion. On the Macbook Air it's happening with an OWC SSD in a Sonnet Thunderbolt expansion chassis. On the Mac Pro, I have the same type of Sonnet chassis with the same type of OWC SSD and have had the same issue with that. In order to keep operating, I tried using my USB 3 "MiniPro" SSD and had the same issue with it even while just restoring my data from a Time Machine backup on the network. I have all the usual "don't sleep" system settings in place and the machine is accessible 24/7, but these added drives keep getting "improperly ejected" by themselves to the point of being corrupted so I can't write to them and even had mounting issues and unsuccessful initial attempts at reformatting after this happened. I'm actually sending the OWC drives back to them to be checked out (they won't reformat now) , but after seeing all the stuff on this thread, it seems to be some sort of MacOS issue.

As a contrast, I have a Mac Mini running OSX Server (Mountain Lion) and had the USB3 MiniPro SSD on it (and it has another external Thunderbolt drive) and _never_ have had any issue with it. Note that OSX Server apparently never spins disks down (I had looked into that thinking that allowing the external RAID that I use for backups might have a prolonged life if it could spin down) so I'm thinking this issue is very likely some energy saving measure related to spinning disks down that's not working correctly.

I have tried several suggestions (Jettison, caffeinate, other stuff) from the various discussion threads on this. Again, note this happens even if the machine isn't sleeping in any visible way.

As a suggestion, try not to fix the error message.

That might save you countless wasted hours in the future.

As Apple directly said to me ... 'check software updates periodically for updates'.

(this was after the countless hours bit)

I was trying the various work arounds just to have a functioning system until Apple provides a proper software update to resolve this issue. I do audio/music recording and have large sample libraries (close to 500 Gbytes) that were on a second internal drive on my old Mac Pro and with switching to the new Mac Pro (no internal bays) had to set up the external chassis/SSD drive for this data. But I have not had a stable, working system for than a few days at time with the drives (I assume due to eventual corruption due to "eject" problem) getting to the point where I could read but not write data, working for a while after reformatting and reinstating the data from my backup, and now to the point where I can't even reformat one of the OWC SSD drives. It's pretty frustrating as I'm pretty much "hard down" because of this issue. I'm almost on the verge of buying yet another Thunderbolt drive to try but probably would be throwing money away in doing that. I may try putting a drive on the MacMini server and accessing over the network, but not sure I will get very acceptable loading times for the audio sample data.

I feel your pain - I too use my MacMini for audio recording.

I had been fairly convinced that the culprit was an over extension of power draining from the USB board until people started mentioning that Thunderbolt was also a problematic area.

It will drive you mad if you let it.

I'm in recovery at the moment - but I sometimes check in here to offer support to others going through the same thing.

Apple, quite frankly, couldn't give a toss.

What's frightening is that this issue dates back years, not months or weeks.

I called Apple a few weeks ago to get support on this issue and talked with a Senior Tech rep. He was aware of the issue -- that was good to hear. Since I've been wrestling with this issue off and on for several years, we quickly dismissed the list of possible causes (USB cables, firmware, unpowered USB hub, etc.). He asked detailed questions about how my drives are connected and had me download and run " Capture Data", Apple's app for capturing details about how your computer is configured. I emailed that file to him and he sent it to the Apple engineers to see if they could find any insights about the issue.

Several days later he called back -- the engineers could not find anything. He offered two suggestions: 1) try different ways of connecting my backup drives (via USB Hub or directly to my Macbook Pro; and 2) keep a detailed log and call him if it occurs again. He gave me his Apple phone extension and said to call him anytime about the issue.

I kept the log for weeks... and, wouldn't you know it, the issue did not occur once during those weeks. In fact, it still hasn't occurred since I talked with him. So, maybe that's the solution... just call and talk to a senior Apple rep when the issue occurs and maybe you too will stop seeing the issue for a couple of months.😝

An update on my issue. After I posted here about my hard drives that were hooked to my Thunderbolt display disconnecting, the problem went away for about three weeks. Then it came back with a vengence and it had nothing to do with the drives, the monitor was going black, disconnecting. I finally took the beast to Apple and sat there at the Genius bar waiting for over an hour before it finally started disconnecting. When all was said and done they determined the problem was with the all in one cable of the monitor and since the monitor was only two months old, they just gave me a new one.

I have been having this proble since April 21st. I just got off the phone with Apple again. So far I've gone through ten specialists, including Tier 2s and nobody has the slightest clue. The problem was supposedly escalated to Engineering three weeks ago, I have not heard anything since, and there is no sign on my support case file that this escalation actually happened. Now they want to say it's a hardware problem and I should take the laptop in for a diagnostic. I will not be taking it into an Apple provider, I have had it with them.

BTW, some have mentioned that it doesn't seem that anyone at Apple knows about the problem, even though it has so much attention on the forums. I can confirm that Apple tech support pays no attention to these forums. I told the specialist that my problem is not unique to me or my devices, it is happening to many people with many different species of external drive, that it is largely with Mavericks although some have reported it with Mountain Lion. The specialist flat out said that if people aren't calling Applecare with a problem, they don't know about it, that the forums are only for users to have discussions with each other. So the only way a fix will be found is if people start bugging Applecare with it.

And therein lies another whole heap of pain.

That just about tallies with my experience, except, by the end of my round-and-round - many people at Apple tech. support that I talked to not only knew of the problem but actually had it on their machines.

I've subsequently had certain Apple people e-mail me on subsequent OS updates to see if my problem had gone away (it hadn't).

One way to remedy it though, just swap to a USB 2 external HD and not USB 3 - usually works a treat then.

This is a very big problem that Apple are fully aware of - why they don't fix it though is anyone's guess.

That's not to say people shouldn't keep bugging them about it, but they have their own agenda and always have had.

So very very disappointing isn't it.

Ataynay, what you were told is crap. Many people who have commented on this forum about THIS issue, including me, have called one or more timesand talked with Senior Tech support reps at Apple over the last several years. My last call was about a month ago. I had multiple conversations with a senior Level 2 rep who said he WAS familiar with the issue. I even sent him links to several threads on this forum that date back on this issue to more than 4 years ago. You can see my comment about it in this thread dated 4/22/14.

In my most recent round on this issue, the symptoms occurred every day for about a week and right after talking to this senior rep they disappeared and have not reoccurred since then. Strange, but true.

I have the same problem with a Macbook pro retina plugged to an apple display, purchased May 2nd 2014. I get the message when the machine awakes from sleep until I reboot it. the disk I use is a LaCie thunderbolt connected to the display. I also get the external display going black and the apple logo lightning for 1 second then goes back to normal, just as if there is a cable disconnection.

I also got the freeze symptom and applied the PRAM reset , since then it seems ok, the machine does not freeze but I still get this disconnection error message.

I have connected the disk to the second thunderbolt port of the Macbook....

Guy

I've given up trying to figure this out !!

It seems there is nobody able to write applescripts/automator workflows to cure it.

I'm looking at second hand USB 2.0 Drives to replace the Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ones as they are unusable as back ups because of the risk of corruption.

I've tried running the USB 3.0 drives through a 2.0 hub without success.

Seems a bit sad that a company as (previously) progressive as Apple can't, or won't, sort this out.

I expect it will be 3 or 4 years before I can afford to change computers again so might look at PC's next !!!!!!!!!!

The more recent OS on these seems to work fairly well and, at least, there is a fair bit of technical help on the web if/when things go wrong.

I've only ever had Apple PC's so far because "they worked".

No longer seems to be the case - style is all now, perhaps.

I am really dismayed to have found these unresolved posts dating back YEARS. What the ****, Apple?

I just sank several thousand dollars into an imac 27", 2013 running Mavericks, and my Lacie drives have been randomly ejected with an error message of the computer shaming *me* for not ejecting them first before turning them off. I click ok on the error message, and the poor drive powers down, then immediately powers back up. I worry this will be damaging to the drives and have not used them since, but I can't even have them on consistently long enough to get my data off. The odd thing is I had the drive connected long enough to port over all my old data from my old macbook, and now it won't even stay stable enough for me to get a 20 gig file off of it. The computer did not go into sleep mode at all, I was using it the entire time trying to move files off the harddrive without success.

I have used my lacie drives with my old macbook just fine with my firewire cables, but due to the drive's age I had to use a usb cable to connect them with my imac. I'm wondering if it might help at all to try different cables (but they would still have to be usb), but I get the feeling it is more of a software issue.