Disk not ejected properly

Its very sad to me that due to this issue happening every day on both my quite expensive macs that I have had to revert to booting up with bootcamp and using Win10 instead. At first to prove that this was not a hardware issue, which I have now proved its not, windows logs show no disconnection of usb devices, and overnight backups are always successful. My macs do not just do this when sleeping as none of them were set to sleep and it often happened while copying files to hard drives. Apple's non response on this issue has been really annoying and quite disgusting as its obviously an issue and being forced to go to Windows to make it work is quite pathetic.

One part of this I dont get, why "pull the system configuration folder to the desktop", this folder cannot be moved nor deleted as the system will not let you, so making a copy of it on the desktop seems pointless.

I can't see how this solution will accomplish anything other than confusing my Mac naming. I have had the "disk not eject properly" problem for several years, and have over that time spent tens if not hundreds of hours with Apple on the phone trying to fix it. I should note that only reluctantly would support allow my question to be passed along to technical. At that time, about a year ago, I was told that it was the fault of my external drive or external hub. I have an external HD (raid) running as TM which has (fingers crossed) worked now for several months without more than a handful of dneps. Likewise, my image archive HD, a WD MyPassport plugged into the iMac worked fine until several weeks ago. Then in the last few days it repeatly and sometimes rapidly dneped. When I hooked it into my external powered hub, it worked fine for almost a day. Then the same thing started happening. Apple has never addressed this problem wholesale; hasn't included any simple means of diagnosing the problem (if it is one with the drive or connections - my disk utility said the WD was fine). If the problem relates to some kind of machine address cache which gets dumped in the process of changing the machine name, then Apple should provide a more direct way of deleting that cache. While I appreciate you effort, I am not about to spend hours reconstructing files etc., if it doesn't work. Apple should address this issue directly. At one time I was told they would be; others have gotten a similar indication, but nothing has come of it.

Given the complaints about El Capitan so far, I am leery to update from Yosemite to it. If, however, it would accomplish the same effect as your workaround, I am almost more comfortable in doing that than the workaround that some Apple employee came up with. (PS - did she say if this would have to be done each time there is a dnep? Have you had any more dneps? What's your OS X?)

I get them all the time with El Capitan, pretty much every day when I come in to work. It is pretty bad that Apple has never addressed this problem. Thankfully it doesn't actually seem to cause any harm, at least so far...

This problem is widespread and persistent. I have had it on and off probably as far back as Mountain Lion. At one point I spent 20-30 hours on the telephone with Apple trying to sort it out. It happens to thousands -- judging by the many different discussion threads in Apple communities as well as other discussions, such as those of HD users, the number could be tens or hundreds of thousands -- of people using all sorts and iterations of Macs (iMacs and laptops) running on every recent OS for whom the OS(NB!) - not the user - improperly ejects external HDs of many different brands, with many different connections (both directly to the Mac and and through hubs).

Somehow my iMac has recently (before I upgraded to El Capitan) stopped dnep-ing the external HD I use for TM. (One of the curious excuses I got at one time was that I was using the HD as a RAID set and the OS, although it offers the option of setting up TM to a RAID set, somehow couldn't handle it.) The remaining problem with dneps is with another external HD I use exclusively as an image backup. After experimentation, I have come up with a limited fix, but one with virtually no risk. When the external HD is properly mounted, I manually eject it properly from finder and leave it unconnected for a while. When I reconnect, the iMac finds the HD and it seems to stay found for as much as several days.

I am extremely reluctant to try the alleged fix offered by Robster50. 1) I think those instructions incomplete: what happens to the file moved to the desktop? how does one avoid side effects like loss of connectivity on WiFi and to other cable-connected devices? 2) I am chary of changing the computer name (when I had problems with a new iMac, changing the computer name seemed to complicate the problem). 3) If this is a valid fix to many of the many thousands of problems out there: why hasn't Apple (a) sent out a general advisory or (b) incorporated the process into a major upgrade, as to El Capitan (or even done much the same thing invisibly).

I have had this issue for so long I cannot remember when or which OS it started in, however I have been running the Release version of macOS Sierra courtesy of Apple for four weeks now, and it has not occurred once, I am hesitant but it seems to be fixed.

For the past two days, one of my disks has been going crazy with this message. I am used to coming back to the computer in the morning and seeing one message, but not I come back and wake up the computer, and I am seeing like 8-10 of these messages at one time, for the same drive! Is anyone else seeing this behavior recently?

Yes. But on and off. May happen when Mac "awakes" at night for updates or things that happen through Safari which is a backbone of the cloud environment for Apple. Would be nice if Apple told us what they have been doing about dnpe s all these years.

"1) I think those instructions incomplete: what happens to the file moved to the desktop? how does one avoid side effects like loss of connectivity on WiFi and to other cable-connected devices? 2) I am chary of changing the computer name (when I had problems with a new iMac, changing the computer name seemed to complicate the problem). 3) If this is a valid fix to many of the many thousands of problems out there: why hasn't Apple (a) sent out a general advisory or (b) incorporated the process into a major upgrade, as to El Capitan (or even done much the same thing invisibly)."

Agree with these points - and if it was a valid fix, I think that Apple (or someone) would put out instructions via the command line to perform whatever tasks the system performs when the system configuration folder is absent / rebuilt (I'm assuming the "answer" post by Robster meant that it had to be moved, not copied, otherwise you would just be changing the share name of the computer - though I agree with the poster above that it can't be moved or deleted, so I'm guessing that may have changed between Jan 2014 and 2016).

@Robster50 - if you are still active, can you elaborate on "5. Pull this folder onto the desktop." - as mentioned below, this folder cannot be moved or deleted, only copied. Was that different in 2014 when you did it?

This seems to have done the trick for me on my 2012 iMac which I purchased in early 2013.

Followed the instructions.

rebooted.

renamed my computer back to what it was.

re-enabled my networking.

Problem apparently solved.

Oddly this fixed 2 issues for me.

For more than a year, my Rocket Stor USB drive has been repeatedly saying the Disk was not ejected properly.

And seemingly a separate issue, all email from my dad has been coming up as "Junk" but still in my inbox.

I have tried all kinds of things for making his email not come up as "Junk"

This process that you put forth of moving the "SystemConfiguration" Folder has unexpectedly fixed certain mail always being marked as "Junk" no matter if the sender was in my contacts or no matter how many times I marked the mail as "not Junk"

2 Birds with one Stone.

Thanks for the fix. And thanks for the bonus Fix.

Hi,

This is not quite right as you cannot just pull that folder to the desktop, for one it copies it by default, and 2 it contains boot.plist which cannot be deleted. So this needs editing.

I have had this issue for a very long time, it was fixed on my 27 iMac retina simply by installing Sierra as if my magic, but then this week I bought a brand new MacBook Pro 15 (with the silly touchbar) and did NOT restore it but set it up from brand new, and this issue has returned. I noticed it did it on screen saving or screen dimming, so disabling that so the screen never dims or saves seems to have stopped the issue.

I will try a corrected version of your list and report back if it fixes it or not.

NicW

Interesting.

I followed the steps and pulled it to my desktop.

I renamed the machine.

What is interesting was when I pulled up finder, all of my customization was gone so I had to start putting things back to the way things were.

Something definitely changed.

Perhaps one can pull the SystemConfiguration folder, but what it does is replace it with a default of some sort? Maybe this clears out some of the configuration files that are corrupted or at least are the ones which are causing folks problems with the Disk Ejection messages and in my case legit Mail showing up always as "Junk".

Anyhow. I am not sure it works for everyone or exactly how it works, but for me it was successful and maybe it will be for some others who are having perpetual problems as well.

Upgrading to Sierra would likely have fixed my issue as well especially with a clean install, but perhaps if I migrated the problem could have persisted as it did in Yosemite.

Anyhow... it would be great to hear how things go with your issues and how you fix them. Be sure an post your corrections and solutions.

Thanks

I wanted to reply to this thread and its followers with my experience. I started having "Disk not ejected properly" popups on my mid-2015 iMac 27" Retina for my external firewire Time Machine drive. This Mac is running Yosemite. It seemed occasional at first but then started happening very frequently. My first assumption was the drive so I changed cables with limited success; then I suspected a problem with the firewire bus on the drive so swapped the hard drive into a newer drive enclosure. Everything I tried seemed to work initially - until I stopped use of the iMac for the day and then went back to it later to see it had happened again... when I woke the iMac from sleep.

When I noticed the drive that "improperly ejected" was usually still mounted on the desktop, I searched these communities to see if anyone else had this problem and found this and other threads. Based on what I read and found people talking about the unchecking the option to "put hard drives to sleep when possible."

So I unchecked the option. It's been 5 days now and there have been no more "Disk not ejected properly" alerts so far. I think modifying that one checkbox in my system preferences has resolved it.

So, perhaps by sharing my apparent solution it will help someone else. I'm thankful in my case it seems to have been this simple.

Thanks