Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Hi all,
Every time when I tried to eject usb drive from my macbook air, the whole system freezes. I can open and close applications but unable to shut down the computer. The only way is to hold the power key for a long time and force to shut down the system.
Can anyone figure out what's wrong?
Thank you very much!
Alice
MacBook Air, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)
Welcome to Apple Discussion
Repeated forced shutdowns can damage your SSD so you need to get to the bottom of this problem.
As I understand your problem you attach a USB drive. It mounts in the finder and you can read/write to it. When you are done reading/writing you quit all applications and from the finder window sidebar press the eject arrow or right (command-click) the drive icon and choose eject at which point you can not do apple -> shutdown?
Try force quitting the finder. (command-option-escape) choose finder, force quit then try Apple shutdown.
BTW if you are using Mavericks the behavior of the power button has been changed: to bring up the quit dialogue box you need to hold control while tapping the power button.
Hi,
Thank you very much for your reply. The same situation happened again today and I followed your instruction. Since the Finder was frozen as well (so as the top bar) so I tried force quit. After I relauched Finder and force-quited Word, the top bar disappeared and everything on my desktop disappeared too. I waited for a long time then I tried to shut down my computer by holding control key while tapping the power button. The computer went to a whole white screen. I waited for another 10 mins but it still remained the same. Then I have no choice but to force shutdown.
This situation has been happened almost every time when I eject my usb drive.
I really appreciate your advices.
Alice
Have you verified the USB drive's MBD. Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility->Disk First aid tab select the volume and run repair disk.
What happens (what is the result of a repair)
Thanks for looking at this, themachead. I was led to this page because I am experiencing exactly the same issue. It is not only very irritating but I also realize that I could corrupt my partition.
This happens to me frequently. It happens (almost) all the time with the volume I use for Time Machine. It was happening with the previous Time Machine volume, so assuming it was hardware related I bought a new, larger hard drive only to find the same symptom. Now I turn off TM after use, but it doesn't seem to help either. As a result I just don't use TM as often and use other methods to backup data.
It happened again today with a different USB thumb drive. I just ran Repair Disk in Disk Utility and found no errors.
Exactly the same problem with El Capitan on MacBook Air. Ejecting USB memorysticks often causes the whole system to become unresponsive. No way to get around this than making a Force Shutdown. Asked for help in Apple Stores, but no help from there either. Pretty irritating.
My Macbook air freezes when ejecting usb drive
