Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Mountain Lion improperly ejects external disks

Has anybody else had this problem? Ever since I updated to Mountain Lion, my external hard drives are periodically and seemingly randomly ejected, giving me an error message about improperly ejected disks. I have two drives, daisy-chained in firewire on a 2012 iMac.


Any help would be welcome. Thank you in advance for your help.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.1), 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7

Posted on Aug 29, 2012 9:00 AM

Reply
161 replies

Aug 29, 2012 2:40 PM in response to wjackman

I have a similar problem; however, when I reboot my MacBook Pro (or shutdown and restart later), one of the drives will be reported by Mac OS X that it cannot be repaired. I have wiped, repartitioned and reformated a couple of times and this keeps happening.


I have noticed that if I manually unmount (i.e. eject) the drive, prior to shutting down the drive, I don't have this problem. Once in a while, however, the drive spontaneously unmounts or I cannot eject the drive at all and have to reboot - when the latter happens, the drive is corrupted.


Mountain Lion ROCKS!

Sep 4, 2012 7:43 AM in response to wjackman

Thanks for the help so far. To answer some questions,


1. I have two G-Drive Q hard drives, both fairly recent, MacOS Extended formatting.

2. Both show up in disk utility, when they show up on the desktop.

3. They are both powered with their own power cords.

4. I have run Disk Utility on both, but just recently and don't yet know if that was a solution. The one that I use for Time Machine couldn't repair permissions, due to that command being grayed out. Not sure why?

5. the problem onlly started when I switched to Mountain Lion, therefore I suspect OS problems.


I will try switching the order of the daisy-chain, and see if that has any effect.

Sep 11, 2012 9:40 AM in response to RRFS

Yes, after running with it for a few days, the disk repair seems to have helped. At least, the disks have not been ejected since I repaired them. Interestingly, I am still getting occasional "disk ejected improperly" messages, but the disks themselves remain on the desktop. Something is still wrong, but it doesn't seem to affect workings of the external HDs, at least.

Oct 8, 2012 1:36 PM in response to Bryce Graven

I am having the same problem with a Seagate 3 TB Thunderbolt drive. Drive gets improperly ejected, then wont show up on desktop or disc utility until I reboot. My Firewire external drive is fine. Even though not showing up on desktop, System Info still shows drive connected via Thunderbolt port. And it will eject randomly, not just at sleep. So far no problems when actively writing to or reading from drive. Apple tech support tries zapping PRAM, didn't help.


Anyone come up with a solution? Or even a cause?

Oct 10, 2012 3:23 PM in response to wjackman

I have experienced the same things...... A brand new MacBook Air 13". I have two external USB hard drives. One is for all my iTunes stuff and one is for Time Machine. Both seem to eject randomly and causes the disks to disappear. I have to either power cycle the drives, or some times I have to turn the drives off then reboot then power them back up. I tried the "Caffeinate" terminal command (making sure to leave the terminal program running) and the same thing happens. The first computer I had was a Mac Centris 610. When I got my first real job, I got a Windows computer because everything at work was Windows based. Recently my Windows machine died, so I decided to get a Mac again. I'm not super happy so far.....

Mountain Lion improperly ejects external disks

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple ID.