WD external drive randomly ejecting.

Question

Level 1

1 points

WD external drive randomly ejecting.

Hi, I've seen several discussions on external drives randomly ejecting, but didn't see any concise resolution. I have a Western Digital Passport, P/N WD320ME-01 2209A, using the OEM USB (2.0 I think) cable (~12 inches long). My ~4 year old mac book is running OSX 10.7.3. I use this drive for Time Machine B/U. Seemed to work ok (no ejects) when Leopard was the OS, but, after going to Snow Leopard, and now Lion, I get 'disk improperly ejected' errors when trying to run TM, or ever Repair under Disk Utilities. I did get one good TM back up, under Lion, after reformating the drive [extended (journaled)], but the next time I tried to run TM I started getting the 'improperly ejected' errors. Don't know if there is an issue with Lion (and earlier SL), or with WD drives. The fact that it originally worked leads

Posted on Apr 19, 2012 6:37 PM

Reply

Answer 1

tnethers

Level 3

527 points

Apr 20, 2012 8:21 AM in response to DShipman

I had this same issue occur with a HDD of mine on Snow Leopard. I suspect the HDD is not receiving enough power which can result from a faulty HDD, faulty cable, or the port going to sleep when the mac goes to sleep. Mine seemed to be caused by the HDD itself and unfortunately I had to purchase a new drive. The error did not happen at first, but happened about 3 months in after using the HDD.

The new drive works flawlessly, and I haven't had the disconnect error once; you can always find a leopard machine and test multiple backups, or run a virtual install of leopard (virtualbox is a free client), but I'm guessing it's not the OS.

Reply