Can't Eject Firewire drives

I've been using a collection of 500GB firewire G-Drives for pro-audio & time machine backups.
Up until now, they work great with my old 2006 MBP (OS 10.4) , and my late 2008 MBP (OS 10.5.6)
I just got a new 2009 MBP with Leopard 10.5.6 and whenever I mount the drives, I cannot eject them.
Its a mystery. No applications are open. Spotlight is not running. Everytime I try to eject a drive I get a message saying its in use.
My only remedy is to shut down the computer, and turn them off.
Any ideas?

Means corrupted system files. You should reinstall OS X. You may try this:
How to Perform an Archive and Install
An Archive and Install will NOT erase your hard drive, but you must have sufficient free space for a second OS X installation which could be from 3-9 GBs depending upon the version of OS X and selected installation options. The free space requirement is over and above normal free space requirements which should be at least 6-10 GBs. Read all the linked references carefully before proceeding.
1. Be sure to use Disk Utility first to repair the disk before performing the Archive and Install.
Repairing the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger.) After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then quit DU and return to the installer.
2. Do not proceed with an Archive and Install if DU reports errors it cannot fix. In that case use Disk Warrior and/or TechTool Pro to repair the hard drive. If neither can repair the drive, then you will have to erase the drive and reinstall from scratch.
3. Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When you reach the screen to select a destination drive click once on the destination drive then click on the Option button. Select the Archive and Install option. You have an option to preserve users and network preferences. Only select this option if you are sure you have no corrupted files in your user accounts. Otherwise leave this option unchecked. Click on the OK button and continue with the OS X Installation.
4. Upon completion of the Archive and Install you will have a Previous System Folder in the root directory. You should retain the PSF until you are sure you do not need to manually transfer any items from the PSF to your newly installed system.
5. After moving any items you want to keep from the PSF you should delete it. You can back it up if you prefer, but you must delete it from the hard drive.
6. You can now download a Combo Updater directly from Apple's download site to update your new system to the desired version as well as install any security or other updates. You can also do this using Software Update.

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Time machine-- can't eject backup drive

Hi, everyone.
I have a backup drive attached to time machine. I need to use the firewire port my external drive is plugged into (there is only one) to upload from my video camera. But I it won't let me eject the drive, even though I have gone into Time Machine preferences and turned off the backup. Whenever I try to eject the drive I get en error message that it is in use. What can I do aside from yanking out the cable?
Thanks!

Launch Activity Monitor and see if anything is running that might be using the disk. Spotlight would be my first guess. Spotlight processes start with "md". If that is the case just wait for Spotlight to finish. Don't ever yank a cable without ejecting first. If you get desperate, try shutting down the computer and then disconnect the Time Machine drive.

CD doesn't appear on desktop, can't eject from drive

Hi All,
I just got my new iMac today, love it! But when I inserted a CD into the drive, it won't appear on the desktop, and I can't eject it. I've tried these things:
-Restarting
-Restarting after pulling the power plug for 20 seconds
-Restart while holding down the mouse button
-Restart while pressing down the command-option-F-O keys
-Opening Disk Utility and selecting File > Eject (it's dimmed)
These are suggestions I found from other Discussion posts. Do you have any other suggestions? The last suggestion I read was to take it to the Apple store, I hope I don't have to do that.
From the number of posts I've seen on this problem, it seems to be common!
Thanks,
Lizzy

Restaart your Mac while holding down the trackpad or an the button on an external mouse

Can't eject FW drives - says app is open, yet none are open

This is mildly disturbing: After only 6 months of use, I just got a "Can't eject drives" and something about data being "used" or an app being open, yet *no* applications are open - everything was quit / closed before I chose to eject the drives. Just like I've done for 10 years on Macs.
The warning prompt showed an option to "force eject" which I did not do, nor did I chose "try again". I stopped trying to eject. Then, even *more* disturbing, I clicked on one of the drives and it showed "0 items" on the drive.
I restarted and now the drives appear normal.
Just prior to this happening, I had an additional self-powered Glyph drive at the end of the daisy-chain. Disturbingly #3: while this drive was connected, I received a warning prompt that said "drive wasn't ejected properly" and it disappeared from my desktop. I had done nothing to cause this, it simply happenend. I'm guessing this issue is due to the self-powered factor - I probably should have had this closer in-line to the Mac FW800 bus.
Would this daisy-chain scenario cause the non-eject problem?
Here is my setup:
FW800 out to older Glyph drive via FW400 connection, then daisy-chained to two *brand new* Glyph drives via FW800 connections. ALL drives were formatted properly when I purchased them.
OS 10.8.5
I remember this happening on 10.7, 10.6, 10.5 etc... Hasn't Apple figured this out?
Is there a Disk Utility I should run to make sure all my drives are ok?

I don't think that's the case because the drive successfully ejects upon closure of the QT player. I'm not sure if it is the way they wrote file handling in general in Mountain Lion, or if it is a QT Player 7 issue, but it is definately annoying.
It seems that the Volume becomes locked when a file is opened. When that file is closed, the Volume remains locked until the application that opened the file is closed. This seems to work different than it used to.

Cannot eject FireWire drives

Hi,
Whenever I mount a firewire drive, I cannot eject it again - I always get a -47 error, saying the drive is busy. I have TimeMachine turned OFF, so that shouldn't be causing the problem. Also, I never had any problems with this under Tiger.
Any ideas? I have tried all possible ways of unmounting the drive, but nothing works (except pulling the plug obviously.....)

Hi,
Whenever I mount a firewire drive, I cannot eject it again - I always get a -47 error, saying the drive is busy. I have TimeMachine turned OFF, so that shouldn't be causing the problem. Also, I never had any problems with this under Tiger.
Any ideas? I have tried all possible ways of unmounting the drive, but nothing works (except pulling the plug obviously.....)

What can make my Firewire drive unbootable?

I have a 17" 800MHz iLamp. Here's the situation: I do a complete backup of my HD to an external Firewire drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Now, this used to work just fine, but at some unknowable point in the past, something changed. Now, if I choose the external drive as my startup disk, it won't work. When I restart I get the grey apple screen with the spinny thing, it thinks for awhile (2-3 minutes or so) and then the apple changes to the circle-slash "no" symbol.
The thing is, that same external drive will boot my other machine - a 933MHz G3 iBook - just fine. The problem is somehow specific to the iMac.
I'm running 10.3.9.
The data on the backup drive seems good otherwise, and I have tried repairing privs post-backup, to no avail.
Any thoughts on why this might be?

Nobody really knows. There's lots of posts in here about it.
Some people are re-installing, going back to 10.4.3. You'd have to archive and install, upgrade to 10.4.3 with the COMBO drive and consider updating your Quicktime.

System hardlocks when ejecting firewire drives

Anyone else having this issue? I've had it since the 2.6.16 kernels, and I'm currently running -8. I have both an ipod and an external hard drive that will hang the system about 75% of the time when I "safely remove" or use the eject command and unhook them. Both are firewire. I can't find anything in the logs.

I may have solved this. Sometime during recent upgrades my system started loading the eth1394 module along with the regular 1394 modules. I've never seen this before, and have no use at all for it - more to the point, it was screwing with my existing ethernet. Reasoning there might be a connection, I've added eth1394 to my blacklist, and so far have not been able to make my box hang. I've also upgraded to 2.6.16.2 w/o issue.

MacBookPro:Can you add firewire drive & video device at same time?

I want to buy a MacBook Pro 15" to edit on FCP and FCXpress, but i am concerned that there is only one Firewire Bus (and plug). I have a Canopus AVC 100 and an external firewire 400 drive and want to use both at the same time. I have always been told that you have been told you can not add a firewire video input source or a hard drive on the same firewire bus. The internal drive is not big enough for my projects and I want to capture directly to the external drive. I have been looking at several solutions, such as adding an ExpressCard-ePCI to give me an additional Firewire Bus. (The FireWire 800 addition would also be a bonus.) Are the two Firewire ports (400 & 800)on the 17" MacBook Pro on the same bus (resolving this problem)? I am looking to see what other editors are doing to solve this issue?
867x2 Mirror Door G4 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

You shouldn't have any problems either
I field dozens of questions each week with issues on desktops and laptops due to the single FW bus limitation.
Glad it works for you, but please don't assume it will work in all configurations.
Some cams and FW devices do not play well together.
For less than $80.00 you can get a ExpressCard/34 firewire card.
I believe it's a good investment, particularly for the high overhead in FCS 5.1.

Can't eject USB drive

Hi,
This is driving me crazy. Every time I used a USB drive, I am told that it can't be ejected because a program is using it. Sometimes it says the finder is using it (it shouldn't be: if the finder is using it it is only listing it as a drive). Relaunching the finder using "force quit" doesn't help: it just changes the message to "one or more programs may be using it". Shutting down every single program - none of which are using it anyway - doesn't help. I eventually get a force eject option, which I use, though that comes with a warning that force eject may damage files.
Any help appreciated. Running Yosemite on a late 2010 Air (though I get the same problem on my 2011 Macbook pro).
Thx.

I've been seeing the same problem (and reported it as a bug) with a number of applications (though not the Finder). When a file is in use it is flagged by the system Yosemite seems to either not change the file's flag to not in use or the system isn't getting that the flag has changed. So far exiting the program has solved it for me in every instance - though it is a pain. I think for now it is something we'll just have to live with until Apple tracks it down.

Can't repair firewire drive

When I try to repair my firewire hard drive with disk utility I get the error message below.
Verify and Repair disk “Monster Drive”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 244930)
Invalid sibling link
Volume check failed.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Does anyone have any ideas?
24" iMac Intel Core 2 Duo Mac OS X (10.4.8) replaced by Apple after 6 repairs -->20" iMac G5 rev A

Hi mwachel,
Sounds like your drive is corrupted. I suggest backing up all data off it, then doing a format with the "Zero out all data" security option checked, then copying your data back on.
If you can't get to the data currently and it is important, you can try using DiskWarrior to recover it, or a commercial disk recovery company.

Can't see FireWire drive as a network drive

I am trying to share a LaCie 250 GB Fire Wire hard drive over an all-Mac network. The drive is FAT32 formatted. I am not able to modify the permissions for the drive. When I log into the computer that has the drive connected, the Fire Wire drive does not show up as an available network drive.
Any ideas?

Since you are all Mac, might try formatting as OS Extended (journaled) for starters.
Joe

How can i eject a cool edit pro driver?

Hi, can anyone help me please?
I can not eject a driver "cool edit pro" from my Imac...

Shut the computer down. That will force it to quit whatever is running or it believes is running. Then hold down the trackpad button while you start it up again, until the disc is ejected.

Unable to Disconnect (Eject) Network Drive (Share) 10.4.8

Help, please.
Background:
We are running a MacMini in our office that has SAMBA running to share files across both mac and pc space. Works fine, never have a problem with it.
Problem:
However, since the update to 10.4.8, I have now seen (about 4-5 times) the following problem: After being logged onto the Samba Network Share (Network Drive) for the workday (using Airport), the client machine is unable to eject/disconnect the share. In the end, the finder hangs so bad, that we have to power off the mac.
Regression:
(1) I have seen this problem on both a TiBook (10.4.8) and a 1 week old MacBookPro 15.4".
(2) Typically, on first attempt to eject the network drive, I get the finder response that the drive is busy and cannot be ejected. I can quit all open applications, but this does release the drive.
(3) On the second/third attempt, I continue to get the same error message. I can sleep the machine, but I still can't eject the drive. On occasion, the finder hangs and I get spinning BBOD.
(4) On one occasion, I was able to shut Airport off and after a LONG wait, the finder gave up and disconnected the drive (this is similar to how it used to behave in 10.4.7. Not wonderful, but slow and functional).
(5) However, the last few times when Airport was disconnected (or the machine was sleeped and then awoken elsewhere) the spinning BBOD remained and the finder was completely unresponsive. In this case, I am unable to even force quit the finder, turn airport back on, or anything at all. This results in me having to force power off the machines...an embarrasment for a mac enthusiast.
Questions:
(1) Any thoughts?
(2) Is there a command line tool that allows me to "snoop" and figure out which process is tying up the network shares?
(3) After the force power-off, which logfile or crashreporter should I be looking at so that I can send it in to help track the problem down?
Thanks all!
TiBook Mac OS X (10.4.8) Also seen on MacBookPro 15.4"

BDAqua,
Thanks for the link to Applejack. I've run it twice (once manual, and once in full AUTO deep clean). It fixed some pref's, but didn't find any problems with the disk or anything.
Let's see where that puts us...
Further Regression
(1) I can re-create the problem by inserting a CD-ROM or connecting to a network SAMBA share.
(2) On a FRESH BOOT, I can eject, re-insert and eject the CD-ROM with no problem at the login screen. However, once I've logged into an account (any account will do), I am no longer able to eject the CD even if I log back off.
(3) I have noticed that when I try to eject the CD-ROM I get another instance of diskarbitrationd launching (for 2 instances total). Not sure if this is normal or not.
(4) I have tried to run "sudo diskarbitrationd -d" from terminal to get some debug info, but it always responds with "service is already running". Even a -SIGHUP won't allow me to relaunch diskarbitrationd (since it autolaunches immediately)
(5) I trolled through /var/log for anything interesting but could only find something in the system.log. Mar 8 08:37:22 MyDrive kernel[0]: disk0s3: I/O error. The interesting thing is disk0s3 is my internal drive.
(6) I took a look at pdisk to see what I could see. rdisk0s3 is definitely the main partition on my internal HD. It is unable to read the partition map of the CD (rdisk1). I'm not sure if this is normal for CD-ROMs or not.
(7) I've trolled through /etc/mach_init.d and a few other places where diskarbitrationd things lie. Not sure what to look for but didn't find anything interesting.
So....if anybody has an idea on what service to look at or try to get debug info out of (or how to get diskarbitrationd to actually enter debug mode...) I'd be hella thankful.
-Red

How to boot from external firewire drive

Apparently my internal HD on the powerbook has died as it repeatedly gives me the black screen "restart" message and re-install of system software fails.
I have an external bootable firewire drive, which is a "carbon copy" of my iMac, however, it's SnowLeopard not Leopard, so is there any way I can use the firewire drive to boot off of on the G4 or any other suggestions?
Also, does anyone know what Apple typically charges to replace the internal drive in the PB G4? I looked at the video for doing it myself and that is not an option for me.
Thanks!

The black screen restart message, or kernel panic, can be caused by a number of causes, most which are typically hardware-related, and many times a problem with memory. Try re-seating the memory to see if that makes a difference.
This is a good read on kernel panics: http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html
If you have the original OS X disks that came with the system, find the first one that should say 'AHT Version x.x' in small print on the label. Insert it and reboot while holding the alt/option key down. Choose the Apple hardware test, and when prompted, choose the extended test. That might give you some additional information on any hardware issue(s).
You can't use your Snow Leopard bootable drive on the Powerbook, as Snow Leopard requires an Intel-based system.
If it turns out it is a hard drive issue, be aware that Apple will keep your current hard drive as a trade in on a new drive. Some people have private data on the hard drive and have a concern with it leaving their ownership (even if the drive isn't working).

Can't eject DVD - "device is busy"

I'm attempting to install the Orange Box in Wine. It finished with disc 1 and is asking for disc 2. The button on the drive won't eject it so I went to dolphin to eject it but it cannot be unmounted. I tried "eject /dev/cdrom" from the command line and it gives the following error:
/sbin/umount.hal: Unmounting /media/Orange Box failed: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.Busy: umount: /media/Orange Box: device is busy.
How can I force it to unmount and eject?

DWilliams wrote:
karol wrote:
DWilliams wrote:Yeah but I don't want to terminate the installer since I'll probably just have to start it all over again and hit the same problem.
Maybe you can copy the contents to your hard drive and 'mount -o loop file.iso /mnt/image'.
Actually I just read the Wine appDB entry for this and they had a solution. I mapped my cd drive to D: in Wine and then called "wine eject D:" and it released it. I'm still disappointed that even root can't eject a drive in use. I thought the whole philosophy of using root was "do what I type regardless of the consequences". I mean, I can make a typo and erase the contents of my hard drive but not unmount a DVD?
I think that even the root can't lift himself by the bootstraps but he can leap out of a tall building - if he wants to.
Root can kill any process and then eject that damn disk but some things are (what I call) logically impossible.

Can't Eject Firewire drives

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