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inwitinwit Author

Level 1

8 points

mds_stores prevents unmounting of external disk drive

Since upgrading to OS X El Capitan, attempting to unmount an external disk drive fails sometimes if the drive is being used by mds or related processes. For example:

% sudo diskutil umount /Volumes/Kolyvagin/

Volume Kolyvagin on disk3s2 failed to unmount: dissented by PID=185 (/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Metada ta.framework/Versions/A/Support/mds_stores)

Using the Disk Utility application also fails to unmount the drive. What is the proper procedure for unmounting the drive gracefully in these circumstances?

Posted on Oct 1, 2015 3:04 PM

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Best reply

Level 1

30 points

Posted on Oct 21, 2015 3:13 PM

Open up Activity Monitor
Locate the mds_stores process
Click once to highlight the mds_stores process
Click on the X icon just above "Process Name"
Click on Force Quit
Enter your Admin credentials and click Okay
Now retry your unmount.

Don't worry, launchd will restart it, but this time it should behave a bit better.

You may need to do this every so often in El Capitan it seems. This is a bug.

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3 replies

Best reply

Level 1

30 points

Oct 21, 2015 3:13 PM in response to inwitinwit

Open up Activity Monitor
Locate the mds_stores process
Click once to highlight the mds_stores process
Click on the X icon just above "Process Name"
Click on Force Quit
Enter your Admin credentials and click Okay
Now retry your unmount.

Don't worry, launchd will restart it, but this time it should behave a bit better.

You may need to do this every so often in El Capitan it seems. This is a bug.

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Level 1

4 points

Feb 26, 2016 3:21 PM in response to inwitinwit

Since you're in the Terminal, you can Force-Quit like this:

% sudo killall mds_stores

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inwitinwit Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 21, 2015 3:31 PM in response to TonyPlack

Thank you very much for your answer. While I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, it is good to know that it is safe to kill mds_stores.

My own temporary work-around was to disable indexing on external drives using the mdutil command. For example:

% sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Taniyama

/Volumes/Taniyama:

2015-10-21 15:19:46.884 mdutil[21386:563134] mdutil disabling Spotlight: /Volumes/Taniyama -> kMDConfigSearchLevelFSSearchOnly

Indexing disabled.

Of course, this means that Spotlight may not work very well at finding files on that drive.

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mds_stores prevents unmounting of external disk drive

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