External USB Drives Not Mounting on Wake From Sleep on new iMac Pro

Update: I am very pleased to say that one of the two issues, the dismounting of any USB external hard drive on waking the iMac Pro from sleep, has now been resolved through the help of my Apple Support Senior Advisor and the engineering team that he was working with. The problem was caused by a small program called Qfinder Pro that was installed on my iMac Pro and which ran at startup. I have a QNAP NAS that I use to store all of my 25,000 photos which allows me to work in Lightroom on any of my Macs. Qfinder Pro is a program that searches my network for QNAP servers, lists them, and allows me to connect to the NAS of choice. Since I only have one NAS, I really have no need for the program once the NAS has been shared. The Apple engineers found that Qfinder was continuing to search the network for attached drives even after my iMac Pro was put to sleep. This somehow caused all USB hard drives to be ejected on waking it from sleep. The solution was very simple. Qfinder Pro was removed from my list of startup items as well as from other locations in the user and system libraries where it existed. I have now woken my iMac from sleep with all USB ports connected to various USB hard drives five times over a day and a half and each time all the drives

were mounted and ready for use. I am extremely grateful to Apple Support for sticking with me to solve this issue.

To date my second issue which is being unable to get past the Windows 10 startup screen when booting into Windows with Bootcamp when any external USB hard drives are connected has not been corrected to date. I can only boot into Windows if I disconnect all USB drives before trying to do so. In addition my Apple Magic Mouse has stopped working in Windows 10, and I have had to switch to a Logitech Anywhere Mouse with a USB receiver. The Magic Mouse in Windows says it is connected when I left click with the mouse but the cursor does not move. The Magic Mouse works fine in OS X on the Mac side. I have tried reinstalling Apple's drivers numerous times as well as many system checks of Windows. To date no solution to these issues has been found. I have filed a new Apple Support ticket with my Senior Advisor and we continue to work on the Bootcamp issues with my iMac Pro. I have Windows 10 installed on three other Macs and none of them have any issues booting into Windows 10.

Tom

Just an update to say that the issue with my two external USB3 drives not mounting on wake from sleep has apparently been resolved. I did a PRAM reset and I have not had the external hard fail to mount since doing so. Love this iMac Pro!

Tom

Angelo,

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

The very first thing I did when I received my iMac Pro over a week ago was to go to System Preferences>Energy Saving, and uncheck the box beside the option to "put drives to sleep when possible". I have even gone in and checked and unchecked that option again, but unfortunately this did not have any impact on the issue of my two Western Digital external hard drives ejecting during a wake from sleep and not mounting requiring either a restart of the iMac Pro or unplugging and plugging back in the hard drives.

To end on a positive note, I have been working quite a bit to remove unneeded applications that launch when I start up my iMac Pro, and when I put me iMac Pro to sleep last night and woke it up this morning, all of my drives were mounted and working properly. Furthermore, after putting the iMac Pro to sleep for three more hours today, upon waking it all of the external hard drives are mounted and working properly. I am not ready to declare the problem solved, but I am more optimistic than I have been.

Tom

Just wanted to post an update. My iMac Pro has continued to frequently not mount my two Western Digital USB3 hard drives. Three days ago I worked for several hours over three phone calls with a senior Apple Supprt person. We removed every item in my list of programs loading on startup. That did not resolve the problem. We then removed several items from User>Library >Launch Daemons, System Library>Launch. Agents, and a few ktext files that he felt could be causing the problem. The drives still continue to not mount after the iMac Pro wakes from sleep about 75% of the time, and of course the iMac Pro was basically useless with these files removed. The Senior Advisor was to call me back, and further work to restore the files that had been removed but has never done so. That was 4 days ago. I have now restored the essential files to their proper place in order to be able to use this $9,000 computer for useful work. The iMac Pro runs all apps fine, but still dismounts. My two external USB3 HDs about 75% of the time upon wake from sleep.

I have now removed the older of the current two external USB3 drives and replaced it with a newly purchased WD My Passport bus-powered USB3 HD. If that does not solve this issue, I will remove the other WD USB3 HD, leaving only the bus-powered USB3 HD in place. I’ll report back in a few days whether this solved the dismount issues or not.

Tom

Since my last post I have (1) purchased and plugged into the iMac Pro a new Western Digital My Passport 4TB bus-powered USB HD. With only this new HD installed more than 75% of the time when I wake the iMac Pro from sleep, I get the ”drives not ejected properly” and the HD Is not mounted. (2) I then replaced the WD hard drive with an Orico external enclosure containing a 1 TB HD and a USB interface. With that USB3 HD plugged into the USB3 port of the iMac Pro I also got the same message and the HD was not mounted on waking the iMac Pro from sleep. I have done an SMC reset and a NVRAM reset. These did not solve the problem. I have reinstalled Mac OS High Sierra, and that did not remove the problem. I have contacted Apple Support 4 times regarding the USB3 issue. At the request of an Apple Senior Advisor I prepared and submitted a full system diagnostic using software provided by the Advisor and that has been submitted to the Apple Engineering Team.

At this point I have exhausted all solutions that have been provided or can imagine. In as much as the USB3 ports on my iMac Pro are dysfunctional, I have removed all USB devices from the iMac Pro and I am using only Thunderbolt3 and Thunderbolt 2 external hard drives. There appears to be no problems with Thunderbolt hard drives on waking the iMac Pro from sleep.

i am very disappointed that on this very expensive iMac Pro I cannot use any USB3 external HD.

Tom

Update: I have been working with Apple Senior Advisors and they, in turn, with Apple Engineering on these two problems with my iMac Pro now since January 2, 2018. Every few days I hear from an Apple Senior Advisor who either desires to collect additional data (which I am happy to provide) or occasionally to pass along a suggestion from the engineering team. The latest call was last night. The engineering team chose to focus on the new Western Digital USB3 4 TB My passport bus-powered drive as the possible source of the problem even though I had made it clear that my other USB hard drives had been ejecting for a week before I purchased the new WD hard drive and in spite of the fact that I have demonstrated time and again (including again last night) that plugging in a Kingston USB2 flash drive or a Sandisk Extreme Pro USB3 hard drive (and nothing else) into the iMac Pro USB ports results in immediate ejection of whatever flash drive(s) are plugged in after a sleep period of an hour or more. Last night just the Kingston USB2 flash drive was plugged in and mounted when I put the iMac Pro to sleep, but when I woke the iMac pro this morning, it was immediately ejected.

In summary after 3 weeks of working with Apple Support, I am no closer to a solution. I can only fully use the iMac Pro with nothing but the Apple supplied keyboard plugged into the USB ports on the rear of the iMac Pro. Everything else (a total of five different USB2 and USB3 drives of different manufacture) is immediately ejected upon waking the iMac Pro after it has been asleep for more than an hour and prevents me from booting into Windows under Bootcamp.

Tom