Disk Won't Unmount in Disk Utility

I have a WD Passport external hard drive. When I plug it into my macbook pro via USB it does not show up so I went to disk utility to erase and re-format the hard drive as this has fixed the same issue in the past. However, when I try to erase the external hard drive in disk utility I get an error message stating that the disk cannot be unmounted. Please advise on steps I can take to fix this issue such that I can erase + re-format the hard drive so it will show up in my finder again. Thanks for the help.

You could try using diskutil. This is a command line utility to manage your mounted disks:
http://osxdaily.com/2013/05/13/mount-unmount-drives-from-the-command-line-in-mac -os-x/
be sure to close all other applications before trying to unmount as if they're accessing the disk it will be considered busy.
there is also a force option you can use as a last ditch attempt.

Similar Messages

External hard drive won't unmount for disk utility.

Im not sure if this is the right topic area but I have a white macbook and my external hard drive won't unmount. I want to erase it via disk utility but it keeps telling me other programs are using it.

Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

Disks won't unmount

Hello,
I have an old imac, that is running OS 10.6.5;
As of today I cannot get it to unmount any disks:
USB drives
CD's
External hard drives (Both USB and Firewire)
I have tried to repair permissions and repair the disk (Disk Utilities) both cases give a clean bill of health.
The only thing that I have done recently was to perform the most recent update yesterday. Could this be connected?

I'm not sure what's going on to be honest. I Googled the error message however unfortunately while I got hits on it I didn't come up with any replies. If you're covered by AppleCare I'd recommend contact them, you will probably need escalation until you get to someone knowledgeable about Unix. If you don't have AppleCare well you will either have pay for the incident or get support on the forum.
I didn't know. I'm assuming that when you do the SMC reset you are unplugging EVERYTHING, holding down the power button for 5-15 seconds and then powering on with only the keyboard and mouse plugged in. Next plug in one drive at a time and test it. Also if you are using a hub of any type eliminate that from the equation until you can find what is causing the error.
If the problem occurs create another user account and leave it absolutely pristine, don't add any applications, don't change any setting nothing!!! Then try that account, if it works then you know it's not a hardware issue and it's a software issue localized to the user account with the problem.

Time Machine Setup "Choose Backup Disk" Won't Recognize ANY Disks

I'm trying to configure Time Machine for the first time. I open Time Machine preferences and slide the slider to ON. Because no backup disk is selected, a window pops up where possible drives are to be listed. The Time Machine instructions say this...
Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, and then click Time Machine.
Open Time Machine preferences
Slide the switch to On if Time Machine is off.
Click Choose Backup Disk (or click Change Disk if you have already set up Time Machine).
Step 4 - Choose a disk where backups will be stored, and click “Use for Backup.”
You see a list of every available disk that can be used to store backups, including internal hard disks (except for your startup disk), most external disks, and any Time Capsule devices set up for use with Time Machine. If you have partitioned a disk, the partitions are listed.
I do not see a list of any available disks, not even the internal hard disk on my computer. I only have two button options--Setup Time Capsule or Cancel.
When I click Setup Time Capsule it opens my Airport Utility and takes me to the setup page for my Airport Extreme. Why? My Airport Extreme Base Station is already setup and running. How do I get drives to appear in the Time Machine setup window?

My two external drives are connected to my Airport Extreme Base Station via USB. My tower is connected to the Base Station via Ethernet. My internal drive is, of course, internal and is supposed to show and it's not. Here's their formats...
Internal Drive - Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
My two external drives don't seem to show up in Disk Utility. In Finder the format shows as...
External Drive 1 - SMB (FAT)
External Drive 2 - Has two partitions (rather, 1 partition and two volumes) both of which are listed as Apple Share.
I just re-read your note. I connected External Drive 1 directly to the tower and Time Machine spoke right up and asked if I wanted to use the drive for backing up. The format then appeared in Disk Utility as MS-DOS (FAT32).
- It would appear the drive must be directly connected to the tower to be used by Time Machine. Is this true?
- Why does my internal drive not appear as the Apple Help file says it should?
- I may have to purchase another external hard drive. If so, is there a particular format it should be in for use with Time Machine?
Thanks...

Lacie won't unmount

Greetings Gurus,
I took part of my system home to do some work over the holidays and am now having trouble unmounting my Lacie BigDiskExtremeTriple. This drive has always been connected to my Dual G5 desktop (profile listed below), but I'd hoped to get some work done on the MBPro 17.
Here's what info I have so far:
I believe the problem started from having several external FW drives looped through a Belkin FW hub (sorry, no specs on it right now other than 3 FW 6pin ports on each side of the hub) - computer froze and I had to reboot.
I believe this caused some possible directory damage to the Lacie since I had been unable to 'unmount' the drive properly.
Support and Google searches have offered several things to try, but none have resolved the issue yet. Most suggest a 'directory issue with the drive' that Disk Warrior may fix. I have DW3.0, but also read that it's not going to work if the drive won't unmount in Disk Utility (which it wont')
Here is what I've tried so far.
any usage of Finder/Spotlight locks up the system.
Drive seems to work, though I've delayed pushing it with apps (mostly FCStudio), until I can resolve the issue.
Force Quit Finder - have been able to then unmount the drive once or twice, but usually not.
Restart Mac - can usually then unmount the drive, but not always
Check Activity monitor - this shows a Process ID/Name 'mds' at Root level running 99% (any ideas there?)
Run Terminal commmand 'sudo lsof | grep "The-Volume-Name"
- This gives me 4 items (one at Finder and 3 at mds) - Here is what it listed...
Finder 98 kevandholdsworth 19r VDIR 14,11 68 10944 /Volumes/MEDIA/.Trashes/501
mds 186 root 22u VREG 14,11 1069056 4392 /Volumes/MEDIA/.Spotlight-V100/store.db
mds 186 root 23u VREG 14,11 1069056 4393 /Volumes/MEDIA/.Spotlight-V100/.store.db
mds 186 root 24u VREG 14,11 0 4395 /Volumes/MEDIA/.Spotlight-V100/.journalHistoryLog
Is it possible to just locate these files and delete them? or will DW need to do it's own thing?
I'm ready to try Disk Warrior, but would appreciate any feedback regarding the issue before I attempt it.
(sadly, I broke the cardinal rule of not double posting [initially in the 'Finder, Dock & Dashboard Forum], but feel much more confident of getting strong advice here...my apolgies to any I've upset by doing so)
Thanks,
Kevan
PS - just checked my profile and it does not yet list the MBP...It's a 17" w/2GB Ram, same OS and Software as on the G5

It's not backed up yet...I'll do that before running DiskWarrior
I'm not convinced what the issue is. I now am unable to unmount any external HDs (all FW) from my G5.
Jim, Disk Utility is not giving me the option to 'disable journaling'.
Spotlight prefs won't let me add(+) either volume to 'privacy'...that's my understanding on how to remove it from being indexed. However, when I tried 'dragging' one of the volumes into the 'privacy' area, it went 'Poof'...now showing up on desktop, but no longer in finder...is this what you are referring to?
Kenneth, I'm the only user/admin...not seeing an issue there. Maybe I'm missing something from your suggestion. I simply boot up as I always do.
UPDATE...
FYI, here is the original prompt I get when trying to unmount any external hard drives: "The disk "DISK NAME" is in use and could not be ejected. Try quitting applications and try again"
There are no visible applications open...I notice now after dragging a volume to spotlight privacy that one of the text lines from the Terminal sudo command no longer shows up.
I have been able to unmount all drives after starting up from a backup drive (Panther). However, restarting from Tiger does not allow this. I'm also a bit concerned about doing restarts without properly unmounting any of these drives.
Here are a couple of links I've been trying to apply, but it's looking like a backup and DiskWarrior are next steps. A show deadline is preventing me from doing so at this time.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/forums/msgs.cfm?msg=80013&forum=4
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-1572.html
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3651281&#3651281
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301562
Thanks again for all suggestions. I need to crunch out this show and will keep up with this thread until I can resolve the whole issue...will have to award points in a few days.
K

My external drive won't mount. Disk Utility says it can't repair disk and to backup the disk and reformat, but how can I do that if it won't mount?

My external drive won't mount. Disk Utility says it can't repair disk and to backup the disk and reformat, but how can I do that if it won't mount?

See mount section in 1st linked article.
Disk Unmount Using Terminal
Disk Utility – Force Mount Disk

Xserve RAID won't RAID in disk utility

I have a XServe RAID that won't RAID in disk utility. The XServe is fully populated and there are two arrays created. Both of those arrays show up in disk utility and will only be partitioned with an Apple Partition Map. If I try to partition them GUID, that partition fails (system formatter failed). Once, I partition them APM, two volumes show up on the desktop. Then, I try to create a software RAID with those two volumes and I can not get the volumes to RAID together. The error message in disk utility says (RAID can not be modified). I have checked the system log and it says something about a socket error or that it can not bind. Does anyone have any ideas on why I can not create this RAID?
My end goal is to have 2 hardware RAID 5's and put a striped RAID set on top of that to have one large volume for Final Cut video editing.
I'm using a Mac Pro with Atto Celerity 42ES fibre card.
Thanks

This may be a little too late, but maybe it will help. I'm not sure why this happens. I reinstalled my server, and I could not access the drives, even though they showed up in disk utility (as a blank file).
Here is what I did to fix it:
1. Open up Disk Utility
2. Make a disk image of the drive you want to mount, save this somewhere accessible (i saved it on another one of my RAID drives)
3. Erase the disk, it should then mount and be accessible
4. Restore the image onto the drive.
Cheers!

HT1782 External HD won't mount, suggests disk utility to repair, but I can't back it up.

Hello,
I'm having some problems with my Western Digital My Passport 1TB. When I plug it in I receive an error that says "the disk you inserted was not readable". I've read some suggestions that say to you Repair on Disk Utility, but others that say to back it up first. Unfortunately the disk won't mount so I can't back it up. Am I best to unplug it and try it on a new machine? Or verify? Or repair?
I'm sure this goes without saying, but the contents are extremely valuable to me. What is the safest method to retrieve it?
Thanks very much for your help.

I would try shutting down, unplug the WD external drive, restart and after getting to my Desktop, plug the WD drive in and see if it's mounted and readable.

I want to wipe my HD clean. Command R won't bring up disk utility, it just keeps spinning on the Apple logo. I'm running 10.9.3 on a macbook pro.

I want to wipe my HD clean. Command R won't bring up disk utility, it just keeps spinning on the Apple logo. I'm running 10.9.3 on a macbook pro.

Select the Recovery partition. It should boot to a screen like this:
Select Disk Utility and reformat your boot drive, formatting with a single GUID partition as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". Once the partition is erased go back to Reinstall Mac OS X and install the OS on your newly formatted partition. It may take a while and if you downloaded Mavericks from the Mac App Store (duh!) you may need your Apple ID and password handy.
Installing the OS may take quite some time as it will necessitate downloading the 5GB+ OS file.
Now you'll be able to make a clean installation of everything.
Clinton

External Hard Drive won't mount - tried Disk Warrior, am backing up as a .dmg...will this work?

Hi Guys,
Hopefully someone can help! Fairly desperate situation here...
I backed up around 700GB of data to an Iomega external hard drive (supplied by the client), using my Macbook Pro...all was fine when I unmounted the drive at the end of the backup.
The client took the drive away and called me to say he mounted the drive in Windows (on a PC), and he was able to work with the files for a time, but now the drive won't mount...
I collected the drive, hooked it up to my Mac Pro, but OSX tells me it can't mount the drive. It shows up in Disk Utility in the sidebar, but not on the desktop...
I tried repairing the disk using Disk Utility and with Disk Warrior, both tell me the disk cannot be repaired...
I am currently making a backup of the drive as a .dmg file, using a program called Disk Drill...it's slow as I expected, but I'm still not sure the .dmg will mount...because surely it's just making a copy of the data exactly, of which some part is not mounting (a mount directory or something???)
Is there any way you guys can think of me somehow taking the data and backing it up onto another disk?
Specialist recovery services seem to think there shouldn't be any problem recovering the data, and of couse, as a costly last resort, that's what I'll have to do, but does anyone know how they may go about doing it? It is something vastly complicated such as a command line thing?
Sorry about the length of this question...just hope someone can help!
Thanks in advance...

You didn't say what format (filesystem type) the disk was.
However, I'd say your analysis is probably correct. Something has corrupted the disk. You can make a disk image copy to the .dmg which will preserve the data, such as it is, but I doubt extremely if it will fix any file system corruption.
Furthermore, if both Disk Utility and Disk Warrior have said the disk is unreadable I'm dubious that anything else will magically repair it and that recovery probably consists of snuffling through the disk block by block.
However if the filesystem is FAT (Windows) there may be other (Windows) utilities that can fix it.
You said you 'backed up the data'. Does that mean you still have the original data on your MBP? Are you trying to recover the client's changes?

Cannot get MacPro to allow me to boot to an alternative boot disk. Can choose in control panel but will not use the disk to boot. Also won't boot using disk selected using option key

My primary boot disk is encrypted as is a secondary boot disk (backup) but I cannot boot using any other disk. System 10.8.5, MacPro 4.1.
All disks mount using primary boot disk. All disks check out as OK and I have repaired permissions.
When I choose in the control panel the Mac boots but will always use my original boot disk.
When I select the disk using the option key at startup, the boot process stalls with a grey screen and a spinning cursor.
Thanks,
Dave

Still trying to figure this out. I erased the drive, did a format using disk util and then re-installed the system but I still cannot get the disk used as a startup drive. I also tried an external firewire drive and it won't allow me to boot from it either.
I can choose it starting up with the option key but it just gives me a blue screen and the spinning cursor.
If I select it in the startup pref pane it boots into my other startup drive only.
DaveLon

After 10.6 security update 2013-002 PGP encrypted disk won't boot

I ran the latest security update on my very old 17" intel MacBook Pro (It won't boot, so I can't give you the model number). It has PGP encryption installed on it, but I only have my passphrase, not the keys since it's a managed system. Half way through the install, it failed with a cryptic error, and the machine won't boot now. It gets half way through booting, and the screen goes black.
I have booted into single user mode, and ran fsck and applejack, only to get an error about a sibling error, and the hard disk is full.
Is this a PGP issue? Does the latest security update conflict with PGP?
I found this resolution to a similar sounding problem in 2010, but am unsure if this is happening now. Google searching hasn't yeilded anything so far.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101111120329585
Thanks for any help.
Melissa

About PGP I can't tell; the hint you linked (and the suggested fix) might still be valid:
PGP recommends folks to decrypt their drives first, update to 10.6.5 and then re-encrypt.
this sounds as a general recommendation.
However fsck reported a sibling error (an invalid link sibling error I presume) and that's not fine. Afaik, Disk Utility can't fix it; DiskWarrior hopefully will. I quote from Alsoft Support Database:
Question
Is DiskWarrior capable of repairing an "Invalid Sibling Link" error?
Answer
This is an error you definitely don't want. It indicates that parts of your directory, and therefore some of your files and folders, are inaccessible.
Mac OS Standard (HFS) and Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) disk directories have a very complex structure. Each file or folder (item) on a disk has an entry in the disk's directory. These entries are in order of enclosing folder and then item name. This is similar to a yellow pages directory being ordered by type of business and then business name. Just like a yellow pages directory, the disk directory has pages except that its pages are called nodes. Unlike the yellow pages, nodes are dynamic and change as you add and delete items. It's sort of like a realtime yellow pages.
Imagine that the pages of the yellow pages are not in order and at the bottom of each page it says "Continued on page n," where n is the page that contains the next set of listings for the particular type of business that you're looking up. Well nodes are not arranged in order and each node has a reference, or link, to the next node that contains the next set of ordered items. This link is what is referred to as the sibling link.
A sibling link error is a bad link to another node. Either the link refers to the wrong node or it refers to an invalid node. As I said, a sibling link error makes some of your items inaccessible and can even prevent a disk from mounting. Sibling errors are notoriously difficult for some of the patching type of disk repair utilities to repair. Sometimes the repairs fail and the directory is damaged further. If a disk with a sibling link error is still mountable, I would advise backing up the accessible files and folders on the disk before attempting to repair it with that type of disk repair utility.
I'm not really sure DiskWarrior will work on a PGP encrypted disk. According to a few old Google matches, it should. See e.g.:
http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4263350
but according to more recent ones, it won't:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2719460?start=0&tstart=0
It seems you're out of luck even with Safe Boot (from PGP Whole Disk Encryption Command Line User's Guide):
The Mac OS X Safe Boot feature does not work on a boot disk that has been whole disk encrypted; if you hold down the Shift key to enter Safe Boot, the system will fail to boot after authenticating at the PGP BootGuard screen.
So, while you're waiting for some more knowledgeable advice, you might backup your data to an external drive while booted in single user mode. There are many how-tos out there; I think this one is pretty clear:
http://jsalovaara.com/blog/backing-up-files-to-a-usb-drive-using-single-user-mod e.html
Hope this helps.

How do You "unmount a disk"?

I have a G4, with 3 Hard Drives, OS Tiger. One drive give this error message when you use the Utility to verify the disk -
"Verify volume failed with error Could not unmount disk"
I've tried the widget, to no avail
please reply
gfclef

You need to burn the disk image to the DVD disk.
1 - mount the disk image by double clicking on it.
2 - launch Disk Utility
3 - in the side pane select the .img part of the disk imge in the side pane.
4 - click on the Burn button.
Follow this workflow to help assure the best qualty video DVD:
Once you have the project as you want it save it as a disk image via the File ➙ Save as Disk Image menu option. This will separate the encoding process from the burn process.
To check the encoding mount the disk image, launch DVD Player and play it. If it plays OK with DVD Player the encoding is good.
Then burn to disk with Disk Utility or Toast at the slowest speed available (2x-4x) to assure the best burn quality. Always use top quality media: Verbatim, Maxell or Taiyo Yuden DVD-R are the most recommended in these forums.
OT

Had to reinstall Panther - now CD won't recognize OS9 disks

I have a B&W G3 with 2 hard drives in it. Had to replace the larger of the two, and of course it was the one with my startup system (or one of them.) I could boot from my 9.2 startup disk which was on the other hard drive. I made a copy, using the disk utility restore function, on to a backup drive so that I didn't lose everything on the crashed disk. Then I replaced the hard drive, partitioned it and reinstalled Panther all the way to the most recent update. I was able to capture just about 98% of all of my previous system setting, extensions, etc., yet now when I put in an older CD (that was comaptible with OS9) it says it is "unrecognizable" and wants to inititialize or eject. When I go to system profiler it says there is no OS9 drivers for the CD. It is the original CD ROM from Apple, a matshita CDR. How can I recapture the driver? Where would it be?

Daisy:
Since you already have everything in place on separate partitions, and it is so much of a hassle moving stuff around, I suggest you leave things alone until you need to something by way of re-installation.
In terms of backing up a firewire external HDD would be prefereable as you could then use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone to the firewire external, which you can then use as an emergency startup drive. It makes backing up a lot easier. SuperDuper is very easy to use and efficient. CCC works well, too, but is slightly more complex.
Re: Had to reinstall Panther - now CD won't recognize OS9 disks
Posted: Aug 22, 2007 11:05 AM
So, Cornelius, what you are saying is that I am making it harder for things to function smoothly? The reason I have been doing the partitions is to save time when running something like Disk Utility. It goes a lot faster on a 20GB than it would on a 100GB, or am I wrong in assuming that?
Now I have the daunting task of removing everything that I have finally gotten in place to the backup drive, and reformatting my MAC! UGH! Is there an easy way to do this without re-installing the major programs I use? When I was getting the data off of the previous bad drive, I dragged and dropped them onto the backup disk (a Simpletech 160GB USB) and that was very time consuming. I think it was slow because I have the old USB 1.1 and the backup is a USB 2.0. I did not use the backup software that came with it, because I was in panic mode and accidentally erased the program when I formatted the backup drive. Now I have it, but haven't used it yet. Even so, I was able to drag and drop most of the files and it worked fine, but I had to reinstall the OSX, QuarkXpress, and Indesign. This has been going on for a couple weeks and I am still tweaking things to get it right.
When I used the "restore" function it put the drive on the backup but not in a folder. When I dragged and dropped it went across like folders. Do you have any advice for me to make this less painful?
+One more point - if I did use the install OS9 drivers the first time, and it didn't, what would it do if it was only one partition? Would I get them back or not?+
You can check to see if the OS 9 drivers are installed by going to Apple Menu > About this Mac > More info > Hardware > ATA. In the lower section of the main panel go down the list and look for OS 9 drivers installed. It will say yes, or no.
Good luck.
cornelius

Couldn't unmount the disk

Hi,
I couldn't get through the spinning gear.
It has happened other times, and in the past I solved it by reformatting, reinstalling OS X and restoring from Time Machine.
This time, after running Disk Utility from the original Snow Leopard DVD, I get the message that UTILITY COULDN'T UNMOUNT THE DISK.
I canNOT:
- repair disk/disk permission
- initialise the disk or modify its partition
- install OSX from scratch
- restore from TM
I'm really puzzled, as I thought I saw them all!
What could I do?
Luckily, had a sort of sixth sense and have done the backup yesterday.
Note: I have a vintage MacBook Air A1237 and OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard (which was not the one originally installed, had to upgrade later).
Thanks,
Stefano

Hi Eric,
Thank you again for your answer!
Have tried to use Terminal, and also to dis/reconnect the disk physically.
Point is: this is the internal SSD!
Will do as follows:
- replace the SSD with an original Apple one (I was advised to replace it with an equivalent one at a Genius Bar by Apple staff!)
- buy the latest MacBook Air ... Can't live with a fault every two months!
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Stefano

Disk Won't Unmount in Disk Utility

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for