External hdd won't eject properly since El Capitan

When I upgraded/installed El Capitan this seemed to disappear. I had an ongoing series of calls from Apple Tech Support about it... thought it was resolved, but it seems to have come back this past week. Not 100% sure but it maybe could be linked to putting my mac to sleep. Going to try and dig up the tech support number or message if I can and call them back because they seemed genuinely concerned about the overall problem. That... is good.

Mike

Great news thanks, Apple have also been in touch with me but as my symptoms keep changing I cannot give them a clear concise version of what is happening. Sometimes I get a second Mac Hard Drive icon replace my back up drive one and sometimes it just all cancels itself and becomes normal again. I have not had to do a restart of my Mac for some time. I have noticed this since one time when it happened I entered TM and back out again and all came OK and it has not been as problematic as it was and now usually corrects itself.

No set pattern to this at all. The information Apple have requested me to supply only refers to one scenario which has not occurred of late but did happen a lot at the beginning. So all very much a changing scene with me. It is not bothering me as much now and hopefully Apple will apply a fix asap.

My "can't eject External Hard Drive (the one on Time Machine) problem" seems to have gone. The last 2 times I elected the Hard Drive before a restart, it ejected normally, including tonight. This is the case for both my Macs, so fingers crossed. However, when I enter Time Machine I still get the spinning wheel for a few minutes when I close it.

This worked for me. Thanks!

It did seem I needed to reboot in order for the changes to take effect after adding the drive to the Privacy section of Spotlight settings.

I use G Drive / G Technology brand external drives. I have two and they both require a force eject to unmount now. Its not always after running a TimeMachine backup either. I have a few people I work with that are experiencing this too. The only common theme I can see is that we are all running 10.11.1. I'm sure the engineers at Apple HQ are on it. Now we just wait for the update...

Over the past day my Time Machine is giving messages that the Ext Hard Disc didn't eject properly and errors unable to complete backup. In fact I had to restart the iMac to get the backup to run. The problem is getting worse.

I am having troubles getting my new external hard drive to eject, and I just installed the new OS. How can I get it to eject without doing a force eject?

Apple called me too, so they are working on the problem.

Shutting down the computer was the only way I was able to get my drives ejected. Problem was my computer would freeze up and it would not restart / shut down, that's why I'd have to force shut it down, and that's how my drive was corrupted... Avoid that one. I ended up rolling back to Yosemite, had to do a complete computer reformat, and had to buy a new drive. It sucked. But, no problems ejecting the drive with Yosemite installed. Apple called me too, they are working on this issue, but since I had formatted my computer I wasn't able to provide them with any logs. If you still have Yosemite, contact Apple so they can get the logs, this way you can help solve this problem sooner.

Thanks Tom.

Just wanted to add my 2 cents, and for Apple to know I also have this issue. My external HDD is Seagate (if I remember correctly), partitioned into three drives, and one of them is showing the ejecting failure. However, I think it might be different from what others describe. My drive ejects absolutely fine, but after it ejects, the OS (10.11) comes up with a message saying it can't eject the drive, and whiter I want to force eject - kind of silly siren it already ejected properly. I can however say that adding the partition to Spotlight>Privacy cures the issue, though I should also add that I have only tried this twice. Note that all other partitions, including Time Machine, are all perfectly fine.

I have 8 G-drives in daisy chain plus some drives connected directly - all of them show the same symptom without any pattern since El Capitan 10.11.1

I stopped using Time Machine, stopped Spotlight, I don't use Sleep stetting,computer set for 24/7 run without rest even for a monitor.

Soon I gave up on my previous machine and purchased brand new MacMini. Then purchased new drives, then replaced all Firewire cables with new ones, then purchased new Thuderbolt 2 Dock to check if daisy chain is a problem. Also tried all kind of remedies suggested by user forums.

NO LUCK, all the same issue and comes back when in the morning I have to restart my computer with black screen. Imagine that OS X system is hanging for no apparent reasons - I am talking about clean system by Apple without even one additional 3rd party utility or software installed.

Finally I wrote a brief feedback to Apple, just few minutes ago . I feel back in time for Plug and PRAY moments.

The Spotlight trick (manually disabling then ejecting) worked for me, but this is happening for me on several time machine drives (one @ work, one @ home).

Will keep an eye on things but wanted to weigh in since it's disconcerting. Have only been on El Capitan for a week.