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

Kevin,

thank you for letting me know.

I just got off the phone after an hour or more talking to my 5th Apple Support person and my third Senior Advisor. As before, I reviewed the entire problem for him, he collected lots of diagnostic data, and we sent it to the engineering team working on the problem. To date after two weeks of feeding data to the engineering team, they have not provided me a single clue as to how to resolve this issue. I do not expect to hear from Apple again until next Tuesday, but I shall continue to update this thread with any new developments.

Tom

Kate

Thank you for such a thoughtful response. I have checked out Clean My Drive 2 and installed it on my iMac Pro. It is going to be few days before I know if this app is going to be able to solve the issues with my USB external drives or not, but it certainly looks like a possibility, and I am going to try it. I liked the fact that I could select which drives I wanted to prevent from sleeping on a case by case basis. I selected both partitions on each of the two external USB drives (which have been ejecting on wake from sleep) and selected the option of not having these drives be ejected on putting the iMac Pro to sleep. I also have a 24 TB Pegasus R6 Thunderbolt 3 raid 5 array and a 6 TB Thunderbolt 2 Western Digital Raid 0 hard drive attached to my iMac Pro. They have never presented any problems of being ejected on wake from sleep. This has only occurred for the USB external hard drives so I did not have the app keep those two Thunderbolt hard drives from being put to sleep.

If the Clean My App 2 application is successful in keeping my USB external drives mounted, then I shall have to carefully see how it impacts the second major problem I am having with this iMac Pro which is I am completely unable to get past the Windows 10 logo screen on attempting to boot into Windows with any external USB hard drives attached. If I remove the external USB hard drives then the Mac Pro boots into Windows without the slightest problem. I shall have to see how this is impacted by the Clean My Drive 2 app. I have some software that I use regularly that is only available on Windows so booting into Windows is important to me.

I received another call from Apple Support last night and spent more than an hour demonstrating the problem to this person and assisting him in collecting large amounts of diagnostic data on the problems. I believe that an Apple Engineering Team is working on the problem, but to date the communication has all been in one direction with me supplying information and running diagnostics requested by Apple Support. I am fine with this provided the problem is being worked on as I understand that a problems cannot be solved without a full examination of this iMac Pro. I am hopeful that these two issues will eventually be resolved.

Thank you again for your helpful response.

Tom

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I do not have any peripherals (other than the keyboard that came with the iMac Pro) connected to the USB ports on the rear of my iMac Pro other than the two external Western Digital USB3 hard drives. In. fact, the keyboard is also a Bluetooth device and I often have its lightening to USB connector disconnected so the keyboard is not a part of the problem. I believe that I have eliminated the issue of this being a Western Digital problem because I have found that other brands of hard drives are also ejected 95% of the time upon wake from sleep. Thus I have found that a Sandisk 64 GB USB3 Extreme flash drive and a Kingston 16 GB USB2 flash drive plugged directly into the rear of the iMac Pro are ejected upon waking the iMac Pro from sleep. I have also tried another hard drive (Orico brand) with multiple connection interfaces including USB3 with the iMac pro and it, too, is ejected upon waking the iMac pro from sleep.

Tom

Kate,

Unfortunately, I can now confirm that Clean My Drive 2 does not help with either of the two issues that I am having with my new iMac Pro. I installed the app, set up my USB drives to not be ejected when the computer goes to sleep, put the iMac Pro to sleep, came back in an hour and woke the iMac Pro from sleep. The two partitions on each external USB drive were immediately ejected. I have now repeated this twice more with the same result.

I also attempted to boot into Windows 10 with the two external hard drives attached to the USB ports on the rear of the iMac Pro. As previously, booting could not get past the Windows logo. I repeated this after first ejecting the two external USB drives (but not disconnecting them physically), and I could still not get past the Windows logo. After disconnecting the two external USB hard drives, I was able to immediately bot into Windows with no problems.

I, too, have been using Macs now for over 11 years. I actually have five Macs here in my computer room including a Late 2013 Mac Pro cylinder and a mid-2012 MacBook Pro with Retina display. I have never had any problems with any of these Macs, and the Western Digital USB3 hard drives that are being consistently ejected from the iMac Pro have never been a problem ejecting upon wake from sleep of any of my other Macs.

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

I performed the update on my iMac Pro yesterday. I then put the iMac Pro to sleep and came back about an hour later. The only USB device I had left plugged into the iMac pro was a 16 Gb Kingston USB2 thumb (flash) drive. It was immediately ejected. Thus the new OS release does nothing to resolve the issues I am having with my iMac Pro.

Tom

I am in the same boat. The update did nothing to address my issues. In fact, since installing the update I can no longer use the Magic Mouse 2 that came with my iMac in Windows 10 (it says it is connected but moving the mouse does not move the cursor). I have had to install a Logitech Anywhere Mouse via a USB receiver in Windows to have a mouse. In OS X my Magic Mouse still works fine. Have no idea if the update to OS X could have caused the loss of my Magic Mouse 2 in Windows 10, but I do know it happened right after installing the latest update from Apple.

I also have a 2008 Mac Pro running El Capitan. Apple has released a software update for that machine. It installed without errors, but I cannot boot the machine. It gets to The login window, I put in my pass word and I get the spinning circle forever. I can only boot into that machine with an external OS X clone that does not have this latest update to El Capitan. I have repeated this twice on that 2008 Mac Pro.

Tom

The only USB devices that I have tried on the new iMac pro are external USB hard drives including USB3 and USB2 thumb (flash drives), the supplied Apple keyboard (connected via a lightening to USB2 cable also supplied with the iMac pro), and a Logitech Anywhere Mouse operating via a USB receiver plugged into the iMac Pro (needed because my supplied Magic Mouse 2 has suddenly ceased to work in Windows 10. The external USB drives of all types are repeated ejected upon wake from sleep. The keyboard and Logitech Anywhere Mouse are not impede in any way by waking the iMac pro from sleep.

Tom