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external drive ejects at sleep

I recently upgraded to OS 10.8.5 and now when my iMac (late 2012) wakes from sleep I get the error that my Lacie external thunderbolt raid drive has been ejected improperly. Then it reconnects right away and the Lacie raid manager pops up and says the disks are ok.


Is this a known issue with the OS update or should I worry that my drive may be failing? I have all of my iTunes info on the drive.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8)

Posted on Sep 13, 2013 1:35 PM

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113 replies

Sep 13, 2013 8:50 PM in response to paulhoynak

I have exactly the same problem with my 3 TB thunderbolt external Seagate drive. I never had any "improper ejection" issues since I got my 27" iMac (late 2012) 8 months ago. But right after updating to 10.8.5, I get the "Your drive was improperly ejected" message. This prevents overnight Time Machine backups and necessitates manual re-linking my DropBox. I doubt it's a driver issue. Maybe the release of Mavericks next month (I hope) will fix all of this!


--Larry B.

Sep 14, 2013 9:45 AM in response to paulhoynak

Exact same issue with a Freecom Mobile Drive Mg, 1TB.

If no-one has any solutions then the next best thing you can do is officially report it to apple, the more complaints they get, the more chance they will do something about it. Here's the link: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

I went to the online support site here: https://getsupport.apple.com/Issues.action, and had a chat room discussion about this. My "Apple Support Case" ref is 504734069 for your info, which you can quote when you contact them. I assume Developers already know what to do.

Unfortunately, you can't "uninstall" the update unless you restore the whole of OS X from a previous days backup, at least not according to the guy I spoke to in the chat room. He also advised to reset the SMC and if that fails to reset the NVRAM/PRAM settings (link for SMC: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964 and for NVRAM/PRAM: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379 ). I tried the SMC reset but that didn't work and I've yet to try the NVRAM reset.

Anyway, good luck to all.

Sep 14, 2013 11:26 AM in response to paulhoynak

I have the same exact issue. After update to 10.8.5 my external (USB 3 and Thunderbolt) Lacie drives go to sleep and auto-eject during sleep (latest generation iMac). They also go to sleep while the computer is running. I have "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" un-checked in Energy Saver.


Never used to happen. Next time I'll hold off on updating as there are always more problems created than solved.

Sep 14, 2013 11:39 AM in response to paulhoynak

Same issue.


Getting the same "disk was not ejected correctly" alert every morning from my OWC eSATA disk enclosure housing my SuperDuper nightly backups. 10.8.4 never had the problem. Seems to be a problem with the "Energy Saver" | "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" being ignored when un-checked and the OS spinning down drives anyway. Kind of annoying behavior to have on a Server.


Unfortunately, this could develop into a corrupted disk if this continues. Hopefully Apple fixes this in Mavericks however, I highly suspect 10.8.5 may be the last update to Mountain Lion so I can either live with this, or fall back to 10.8.4 in the interim.


Just my .02. 10.8.5 Server on 2008 Mac Pro 2.8ghz Quad Core Xeon, 12 GB memory.

Sep 14, 2013 11:49 AM in response to gordonf238

To properly go back to 10.8.4 you would need to restore from a previous backup.


I know you can do this with Time Machine but I don't use it so I cannot help you there. Apple support or a quick web search should show you how.


However, if you use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, you just boot from your backup and "restore" from your backup (which you are now running on) on top of your main boot drive, reboot back to your original disk and live happily again on 10.8.4. Another reason I always save my previous backup for at least a week (or more) after any new OS updates.


Good luck.

Sep 14, 2013 12:03 PM in response to Carlos Guerrero

Bummer, I don't use Time Machine. Great. Does anyone know if there's a report-a-bug feature on Apple's website? I tried to find a way to report this to them but there doesn't appear to be a way.


I have 2 years worth of professional photos on my external drives, and I too am concerned about these constant auto-ejects during sleep, and whether they may corrupt my libraries. When loading Aperture, I already see an issue with loading current library, and I know it's just a matter of time before I'll have to rebuid database.

Sep 14, 2013 12:11 PM in response to gordonf238

Hi gordonf238

Please see my post above today at 5:45.


Just FYI everyone. According to Alex, the guy I chatted with on Apple support, timemachine does not roll back apple updates or at least that was what was implied as follows...

Quote

Pete:
I updated my mac book pro retina to mac os x 10.8.5 but i'm now having issues with my external hard drive in that it keeps being ejected, so I would like to uninstall the updates but don't know how. i've looked all over the web and apple forums but nothing. can you tell me how I do this. time machine doesn't seem to roll back the update when I restore to a previous date.

Alex:
No problem. Once you've installed an update to the OS like that (a version update, etc.), you cannot roll back to a previous version. So prior to the update you had no problems with the external drive?

Unquote


Hope this helps

external drive ejects at sleep

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