Partition issue, couldn't unmount disk (error)

goldish wrote:

and as I've explained I've download the usb image for the lion recovery HD booted from it and it still does not work

There is NO download Image of the Recovery HD. There is the Recover HD Disk Assistant which will allow you to create a USB drive of the Recovery HD using the files contained in the Recovery HD partition.

I am having the same problem.

to recap:

• I have a macbook air
• I have two partitions on it (systemHD and usersHD)
• I have an eternal USB drive
• I installed a recovery partition on it (with Recover HD Disk Assistant)
• I booted to this external Recovery partition
• I launched Disk Utility, and have tried EVERY method mentioned so far to erase or repartition or remove a partition…

SAME error every time, "ca so PLEASE don't give me the same rigamaroll you've given Goldish…

The only thing i can think of:

when I rebooted holding the option key, there were 3 bootable drives, my internal Lion startup disk, the internal Recovery and the external Recovery. I selected the external recovery, but what if the machine is just dumb and won't acutally do so, instead booting stubbornly again to the internal Recovery drive?

There is a strange thing in DU: on my external USB ther are two partitions, one has files, the other is just the external Recovry (which i should be booted to). However, DU does not show the external recovery volume under the entry for the external drive, it only shows the one partition with my files… AND then there's a weird little network volume below a grey line (disk1) with the image "Mac OS X Base System" underneath it…

This is screwy, and I think the answer is APPLE MESSED UP WITH LION.

anyway, I need to erase and reinstall, and i have to blank out the internal drive… just gotta do it… so this is really irking me, and goldish too, i bet. Did you ever fix this issue on your mac?

CONFIRMED:

the danged thing won't acutally boot to the external Recovery partition!

my steps:

while in Recovery mode, I launched Terminal

I ran diskutil list

disk0 is where my two internal partitions, and the internal Recovery partition are

i ran diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ MacHD disk0 but got an error that it couldn't unmount, again

I ran diskutil unmount force disk0 but again it said all but one volume were unmounted, doh!

Now, supposedly, I am booted form the external disk, at disk2, so I ran diskutil unmount force disk2 with NO ERROR.

Clearly i was booted form the internal Recovery drive DESPITE expressly selecting the USB drive in the boot menu (when holding option at startup).

APPLE SCREWED THIS UP BIG TIME

What am i going to do? This machine has no optical drive for an installation DVD, and no firewire port for target disk mode, and I don't have an extra disk to install Lion onto… I"M ******

I found a work around, but it seems sloppy and I did things I'm not certain I'd recommend (hopefully someone who knows more than I do will pipe in over here)

the idea was to get rid of the internal drive's Recovery HD, so that i can boot to the external Recovery HD and wipe out the internal drive nice and clean. Thing is I may already have a clean, single partition internal disk before I even boot to the external Recovery HD, but for safety's sake I'm going to follow through as I don't have an internal Recovery HD right now.

BACKUP FIRST! It's not gonna be my fault if you lose your data!

my steps:

1. enable Disk Utility's Debug menu by launching terminal and running defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1
2. launch Disk Utility,
3. under the Debug menu, select "Show Every Partition"
4. select the Recovery HD volume under the internal harddisk's entry (it was greyed out, but worked anyway)
5. go to the Erase tab,
6. give it a new name (i used "blah"), erase it, and confirm
7. select the internal harddisk's entry (above "blah"), and switch to the Partition tab,
8. select the "blah" partition and click the minus button (below, left), and confirm
9. drag the bottom-right corner of the remaining partition(s) down so that they fill the disk, and confirm
10. now plug in the external drive with a Recovery HD on it (I already created this before)
11. restart the machine and hold down the option key at startup
12. NOW THERE IS ONLY THE EXTERNAL RECOVERY HD!!! no chance of booting to the wrong one
13. after selecting your language, launch Disk Utility
14. select the entry for your internal disk, and switch to the Partition tab
15. do whatever you want!!! I just did this and it worked! no stupid error about not unmounting!

harr har harr apple i win again

I'M GUESSING:

• if you reinstall Lion, you should get the internal Recovery HD again.
• if you use more than one partition and then install Lion 10.7, you may end up with screwed partitions (but this is a guess because that's what happened to me when I ran the Lion Installer.app over my Snow Leopard 10.6 installation.
• if your machine is new enough to use Internet Recovery by holding down command-option-R at startup, you may not have to go through all this to avoid booting from the internal Recovery HD
• that there is a smoother, safer way to do this, but i don't know what that is

Now I'll reinstall Lion (just because I added a partition to my internal disk, and I have little faith in hot partitioning). This should create a new Recovery HD on the internal disk, which is itself a hot partitioning, but what am I gonna do? If that messes it up I'll report back.

I also just had this issue and spent ages before I found this thread. So what happened is I couldn't delete the bootcamp partition and I couldn't boot from a recovery USB key (but recovery disk did launch). Nothing wrong with the recovery USB key as I set up another machine just after it.

However I solved it a different way.

1. Booted up into OSX.

2. Ran Disk Utility.

3. Selected the main disk and then partitions.

4. Selected "Bootcamp" and then deleted it. Resized the remaining partition to full size.

5. Rebooted into the recovery disk.

The re-install worked fine. So it appears trying to delete the bootcamp partition only worked if I didn't boot into the recovery disk in the machine. (what some people mentioned earlier should not work).

Hope that helps.

This is the one thing that fixed this for me as well. Funny that it won't let you do that in the Disk Utility from the Recovery Partition, but it will from the Full OS. In any case, this corrects it. Thanks Simod!!!

Christopher

Hey, I dont know if you found your solution but here it is. Firstly, to all the people suggesting that you cannot expand your partition while booted, that's just not true.

The problem isnt the mounted disk, the problem is the way that "free space" (from your bootcamp partition) is formatted. Heres how to fix.

Suggested preface: Verify permissions and disk from command+r disk utility after chime.

Steps:

1) Boot into your OS X, just like you normally would

2) open disk utility

3) click your main disk, not the partition.

4) click the PARTITION tab

5) Click the minus sign on the bootcamp partition, it should go away. dont click apply yet. if its already empty (bootcamp partition removed) go to step 6.

6) Click the PLUS SIGN under the layout, make sure the Format to the right is MAC OS EXTENDED JOURNALED

7) apply.

8) when its done, click the minus sign on the new partition

9) drag your original OS X Partition to fill the layout.

10) apply. done.

Thanks this method works on my mac recovery.

You may not have a firewire port, but you probably have thunderbolt. Buy a thunderbolt > FW800 adapter and boom, you now have a firewire port. I just used one of these along with a FW800 > FW400 adapter and a FW400 cable to bring an older mac up to Lion.

Apple took way too long in releasing this adapter, but it's been out for awhile now and it's an invaluable tool. Target disk mode still exists for this reason, but I don't think most folks know about that adapter or the idea behind it's use.

Thanks geoffist - worked perfectly and exactly solution i was looking for

Open Disk Utility> First Aid tab, and click the Repair disk button on the bottom right corner.

This worked for me. It repairs permissions and in trying to solve this problem for my disk I eventually discovered in Terminal that the external hard drive was saying I "didn't have permission" to write.

So, Give Repair Disk a go and good luck.

Spent many hours trying to figure this problem out. Did every step I could find, from going into terminal and trying manually formatting the disk, to using Disk Utility.

Here's what acutally works. No. Seriously. THIS WILL WORK.

1) Buy a 16 GB flash drive.
2) install Disk Maker X on another Mac.
3) Download your version of OSX.
4) Using Disk Maker X and your new 16GB drive, create a bootable install drive.
5) Boot to that recovery drive holding the option key at startup.
6) Select Install OSX, and choose the same USB drive that you are booted into at the moment. Let computer restart and install OSX.
7) Once you're into the booted OSX drive after install (this is slow, so be patient... you're running the entire computer off a slow USB stick) right click on the drive that isn't unmountable in Finder. CLICK EJECT. It will probably tell you that there are applications being run on the drive. Push through and force EJECT.

8) Open Disk Utility and click the HD that you're trying to format. Click Erase and format the drive.

9) Go back into the Finder and open the OSX Install disk that is on the USB drive.
10) During installation select SHOW ALL DRIVES and select the drive that you just formatted.
11) DONE. FINALLY!

<Edited By Host>

I found my answer for unmounting my disk by eplt@odwon this similar thread.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4117187

Hey guys! I figured it out.

1. Create a Time Machine backup on a separate hard drive.

2. Restart computer and hold the option key

3. It will show all the hard drives you can boot into. Click on your external hard drive

4. Go into your disk utility like normal and then take out the partitions. It won't give you any crap now,

HEY MAN!

I FOUND THAT I GET THIS ERROR WHEN BOOTING BY HOLDING DOWN "U" AND BOOTING FROM AND EXTERNAL SOURCE.

BUT...

IF I BOOT USING THE "U" METHOD ... THEN... CHOOSE "STARTUP DISK" AND SELECT THE USB SOURCE... I AM THEN ABLE TO FORMAT THE DRIVE.

TRY SELECTING "STARTUP DISK" AND REBOOT FROM WHATEVER EXTERNAL SOURCE YOU ARE USING.

THANKS!