Disk not ejected properly

It's great that switching between USB3 and USB2 works for some folks, but for the record I tried this early on and it didn't help. I was using USB2 hubs when the problem started, I got new USB3 hubs, but the "did not eject properly" problem continued. I also tried using Jettison, which helped somewhat but not enough. For me only caffeinate has worked well. I rarely see the DNEP message (maybe 2 or 3 times in 6 months) and my nightly backups are running smoothly.

I should probably go try to bother Apple support about the problem, but (A) that would take a lot of my time and (B) it's an intermittent problem so it would be VERY difficult to convince them it's an actual a problem. If there is some way to vote for Apple to work on this problem without wasting an afternoon at the Apple store, let me know.

An update to my earlier post. After leaving to go work on something outside the office, I came back to discover that my screen saver had kicked on, and, no surprise, the disk had "not ejected properly." I modified the settings to leave all the boxes unchecked in Energy Saver, moved the Computer Sleep and Display Sleep sliders all the way to "never," and then remounted the drive. All this while caffeinate was supposedly running, so that didn't solve the problem entirely. I then put itunes on and muted it but left it playing while I was out for a couple hours. When I came back, the computer still wide awake, the backup to timemachine had finally finished. So I suspect that I could probably uncaffeinate and still keep the disk mounted, as long as the hard drive and display never go to sleep. I'm going to test that hypothesis over the next few hours and see what happens. Obviously, not being able to let your computer go to sleep is NOT a solution to this glitch in the system, but it seems to be the best I'm going to get from Apple (my organization's tech support person has been "on his way over" since last Thursday). Good luck, everyone!

Is this problem happening on any Mac including the new Mac Pro? I don't know what I will buy when my 2009 Mac Pro is ready to be replaced. The new Mac Pros have no internal space for hard drives and I can't see putting up with this problem with several external drives that I would need. Right now, I only have this problem of discs ejecting with 2 external drives--one a USB 3.0 and the other an eSATA drive. I have 4 internal drives that are no problem and one FireWire 800 drive that I use for Time Machine which is doing just fine.

It started for me with a new Macbook Pro purchased December 2013. I had no problems with a previous MacBook Pro which has OS X 10.6.8 "Snow Leopard" on it. Indeed, there is not enough disk space on the new MacBook Pro for even a modest collection of photos and music and such, so an external drive is a necessity. Plus Time Machine and other backup drives.

genius_foo wrote:

It started for me with a new Macbook Pro purchased December 2013. I had no problems with a previous MacBook Pro which has OS X 10.6.8 "Snow Leopard" on it. Indeed, there is not enough disk space on the new MacBook Pro for even a modest collection of photos and music and such, so an external drive is a necessity. Plus Time Machine and other backup drives.

I may have made a comment about this earlier, if so, please forgive the redundancy.

Apple has decided to produce systems stripped of what they probably see as potentially problematic internal expansion options. Some of them (such as Retina MBPs, iMacs) are for the most part sealed and generally cannot easily be upgraded by the user. Main storage and backup storage have to be external. Capabilities that we add to older systems via PCie cards are now also off-loaded onto external expansion boxes.

Under these circumstances, the ports that support all these devices really, really need to work properly. And yet this disk ejection issue has persisted through at least two major releases of the Mac OS, and possibly three: I haven't had time to run a test with Lion yet.

If I didn't have a Mac Pro capable of running Snow Leopard, this would be driving me nuts. I feel fortunate that for me, it is just an annoyance.

What with this and the nightmare over Pages is Apple Mac going off the boil? I have an old MacBook running mavericks and I expect to look for a replacement in the next year or so ... will I be looking at a PC? Jury is out at the moment.

After spending way too much time on this issue, I decided to purchase a new external hard drive with a USB 3.0 connection. At a local store that only sells Apple equipment, I purchased a Western Digital 1TB "My Passport" drive. It utilizes a USB 3.0 connection. I did not install any of the included WD software. I installed it yesterday and selected it through Time Machine as the backup. Since then there has been no self ejection and the unit has done backups as directed by Time Machine. I consider the problem solved for me. It is well worth the money.

That's interesting, mmann1, my Seagate that kept ejecting has a USB 3.0 connection. I got it it to replace my Western Digital "my Passport", because the Western Digital wouldn't mount after I got my new iMac running Mavericks (it worked fine on my old iMac running Snow Leopard). Since I have had the Seagate plugged into a powered USB hub, I haven't had the problem of it ejecting improperly anymore.

It has been 6 full days since I installed the WD Passport drive that uses a USB 3.0 cable on my iMac with 10.9.3 Mavericks. I have experienced no "disk not ejected properly" error messages. As an experiment, I took my old Maxtor OneTouch4 external hard drive with it's USB 2.0 connection that would not work on the 10.9.2 Mavericks and installed in on our church iMac that is using 10.7 "Lion" software. It mounted fine and has experienced no ejections. There must either be a USB connection issue or a software issue.

I am on mavericks and this has just started to happen for me on iMac mid 2011.

Before(no issue) I had :

Standard 1tb internal drive and a nas media centre type 500gb connected via the Ethernet..

Now eject errors on my external 1tb seagate connected through usb2

I have also got the original 1tb in an enclosure connected via usb2 and this does not have an issue. It does have an external power supply.

The internal,drive is now a crucial 256 SSD.

on wake from sleep I see the error message for both partitions of the 1tb seagate external drive..

My gut feeling is that there is some power management issues. I'm going to scan through the Eco settings and see if there is anything going on on the seagate forums.

I doubt that it is power issues, because it is happening with my iPod and with a 1GB thumb drive. I don't have any heavy external drives. I have been wanting to connect my Time Capsule to run a backup but am very much afraid to now, with this problem.

Another update to my series of posts earlier. Now that all the boxes are unchecked in the energy saver, and now that I have the hard drive and display set to never sleep, I do not get the disk ejected message anymore. I have updated to 10.9.3, which may or may not matter - I'm going to check some boxes in the energy saver later today and let the hard disk try to sleep to see what happens while I'm out of the office. In the meantime, I have told the computer to go to sleep manually several times, and after short naps the computer wakes with the disk still connected. So the current setup works, but saves no energy. I'll update again when my energy saver settings are adjusted back to slightly-more-eco-friendly. Thanks again, Apple, I *really love* your new free OS with all its glitches (external display with their own software can be its own horrible problem...) - worth only slightly less than I paid for it.

Final update (I hope): It appears that Mavericks 10.9.3 dealt with my issue, because after I did everything discussed above, my problem was not resolved. After the update to 9.3, I have returned all energy savings settings to their original (10.8.something) levels, and three days later with abundant sleeps in between, I have yet to experience the disk not ejected properly issue. I hope everyone else has experienced the same improvement with that update!

sibebfica, I am glad that the Mavericks update 10.9.3 solved this issue for you. I still had the problem with Mavericks10.9.3. The only thing that worked for me was using a powered USB hub that doesn't allow the Seagate to go sleep. However, I see that my solution didn't work for others in this forum.

kcft: well, I guess Yosemite isn't much better!

FWIW, I have a WD MyBook USB 3.0 1.5 TB external drive connected to a powered (low powered, not high) 3.0 USB hub connected to a MacBook Pro Retina 15" mid-2012 with a recently replaced logic board (because of HDMI problems), using 10.9.3.

I have always had spontaneous disconnects of the external drive. All the WD software has been removed both by their uninstall program and manually for whatever was left. I get these disconnects whether connected to the hub or directly to the USB 3.0 port on the computer, but probably more often with the hub.

Here is the latest Console log of messages before and at the time of the disconnect, and after it reconnected spontaneously. I did have "put hardware to sleep" in the power saving preferences, and I've just unchecked that based on some earlier posts here.

6/19/14 12:56:31.000 PM kernel[0]: disk1s2: media is not present.

6/19/14 12:56:31.000 PM kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s2: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x6

6/19/14 12:56:31.000 PM kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s2: write_journal_header: error writing the journal header!

6/19/14 12:56:31.000 PM kernel[0]: hfs: unmount initiated on MyBook on device disk1s2

6/19/14 12:56:31.000 PM kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s2: close: journal 0xffffff803846ac20, is invalid. aborting outstanding transactions

6/19/14 12:56:31.000 PM kernel[0]: USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): 5743415A4138363735383138 0x1058 0x1140 0x1025, 3

6/19/14 12:56:31.509 PM fseventsd[76]: disk logger: failed to open output file /Volumes/MyBook/.fseventsd/00000000000bbe06 (No such file or directory). mount point /Volumes/MyBook/.fseventsd

6/19/14 12:56:31.509 PM fseventsd[76]: disk logger: failed to open output file /Volumes/MyBook/.fseventsd/00000000000bbe06 (No such file or directory). mount point /Volumes/MyBook/.fseventsd

6/19/14 12:56:32.639 PM mDNSResponder[66]: ERROR: mDNSPlatformReadTCP - SSLRead: -9806

6/19/14 12:56:32.639 PM mDNSResponder[66]: ERROR: tcpCallback - attempt to read message length failed (-1)

6/19/14 12:56:45.000 PM kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s2: replay_journal: from: 17653760 to: 21299200 (joffset 0x2baa000)

6/19/14 12:56:53.000 PM kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s2: journal replay done.

6/19/14 12:57:00.000 PM kernel[0]: hfs: Removed 0 orphaned / unlinked files and 504 directories

6/19/14 12:57:00.000 PM kernel[0]: hfs: mounted MyBook on device disk1s2

6/19/14 12:57:00.961 PM fseventsd[76]: event logs in /Volumes/MyBook/.fseventsd out of sync with volume. destroying old logs. (14714 15 14714)

6/19/14 12:57:01.369 PM fseventsd[76]: log dir: /Volumes/MyBook/.fseventsd getting new uuid: FE177170-818E-46AB-B21B-6556CEEE75D6

6/19/14 12:59:20.703 PM mdworker32[5665]: CGSConnectionByID: 0 is not a valid connection ID.

6/19/14 12:59:20.704 PM mdworker32[5665]: CGSGetSpaceManagementMode: No connection with id 0x 0

Is there anything in the first part of these messages that gives a clue as to why it disconnected (unmounted)?