External Hard Drives Ejecting Spontaneously

I have a 15" MacBook Pro which I purchased new about six months ago. Almost as soon as I bought it I began to have problems with external hard drives, which I didn't have with my earlier identical MacBook Pro which I had to replace due to water damage. I began to notice that hard drives would spontaneously eject and I would get the error message "You Hard Disk Was Not Ejected Properly". At the beginning I thought the problem was with the disks so I changed brands, but the problem has persisted. I have had the problem with Adata, Samsung and Lacie external drives, and I have sometimes lost data. The problem is happening more and more frequently to the point that I am now pretty certain that the problem is with the MacBook and not the drives. I am connecting via USB port, and ther problem happens regardless of which USB port I use. I am running OS X version 10.6.7, 2.2GHz Intel Core i7 with 4GB memory. Does anybody else have this problem, is it a known issue, is there a solution?

Sounds like a tricky problem...since you've changed actual hard drives, I would be silly to ask you if you've changed cables...does this problem of spontaneous disconnecting occur with other USB devices? Try testing something that has equally heavy drain such as an external hard drive

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My external hard drive ejects when copying data. It works on windows and ubuntu. Are there any fixes?

My external hard drive ejects when copying data. It works on windows and ubuntu. Are there any fixes?

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LaCie 3TB external hard drive ejecting improperly

Anybody have experiences with a LaCie external hard drive ejecting improperly? Not able to run long enough to do proper back ups and file maintenace. Closes or ejects on its own.

I just replaced a 2TB LaCie with an 8TB model and encountered the same problem I would get a "disc improperly ejected" message and since my iTunes library is stored there the app would go into kernel panic and require a force quit. Very annoying.
I switched from the thunderbolt ports to the USB and have not had any issues since.
I never had any issue with my My older HD so I think maybe the Thunderbolt connector that came with the new drive was bad.

External Hard Drive ejects during Time Machine Backup

I've read through all the troubleshooting pages that I thought had anything to do with this problem, but none of my error messages seemed to match. This is my first backup with Time Machine onto my external hard drive, and it never gets past about 60GB before deciding that the drive has improperly ejected itself and aborting the backup. The error message from my Time Machine Buddy is below:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb
Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
Backup content size: 147.2 GB excluded items size: 5.1 GB for volume Macintosh HD
No pre-backup thinning needed: 170.49 GB requested (including padding), 930.54 GB available
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Copied 56.0 GB of 142.1 GB, 112101 of 886988 items
Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: Device not configured
Error: (-50) SrcErr:NO Copying /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ge ms/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy/errors.rb to /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb/Eugenio Vargas Computer/2011-05-17-161101.inProgress/E6F5C3CB-75B8-41C4-B52E-138235EB4B34/Maci ntosh HD/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ gems/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy
Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: Device not configured
Error: (-50) SrcErr:NO Copying /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ge ms/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy/http.rb to /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb/Eugenio Vargas Computer/2011-05-17-161101.inProgress/E6F5C3CB-75B8-41C4-B52E-138235EB4B34/Maci ntosh HD/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ gems/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy
Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: Device not configured
Error: (-50) SrcErr:NO Copying /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ge ms/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy/socks4.rb to /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb/Eugenio Vargas Computer/2011-05-17-161101.inProgress/E6F5C3CB-75B8-41C4-B52E-138235EB4B34/Maci ntosh HD/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ gems/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy
Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: Device not configured
Error: (-50) SrcErr:NO Copying /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ge ms/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy/socks5.rb to /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb/Eugenio Vargas Computer/2011-05-17-161101.inProgress/E6F5C3CB-75B8-41C4-B52E-138235EB4B34/Maci ntosh HD/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ gems/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy
Indexing a file failed. Returned 200 for: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ge ms/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy, /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb/Eugenio Vargas Computer/2011-05-17-161101.inProgress/E6F5C3CB-75B8-41C4-B52E-138235EB4B34/Maci ntosh HD/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ gems/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy
Aborting backup because indexing of file failed.
Other details:
My external drive is a WD 1TB drive. The partition for the Time Machine Backup is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), as is my Macintosh HD. The Partition Map Scheme on the external drive is GUID Partition Table.
I have tried reformatting the external drive for good measure, but this doesn't seem to solve any problems. I also tried searching for the file that the error message says NO Copying for (/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/g ems/net-ssh-1.1.4/lib/net/ssh/proxy/...) but I'm unable to find the files. I can get as far as /System/Library/Frameworks, but can find no folder in Frameworks titled Ruby.
Please help.

The Ruby folder is probably hidden. That is why you don't see it.
You may want to add System/Library/Frameworks to the exempted sync list until you can figure out which file is causing this. You can do this by opening Time Machine Preferences ( > System Preferences > Time Machine) and clicking on Options…
After that click the small + key and browse to the folder you want to exempt from the sync. In your case: Macintosh HD > System > Library > Frameworks
Next hit the exclude button with the Frameworks folder highlighted.
Try your backup again and see if it fails.

External hard drives ejecting after iMac wakes from sleep.

External hard drive keeps ejecting after iMac wakes from sleep. TM does not recognise, so have to unplug then re plug in Ext HD, only then TM will perform a back up. Not seamless backups. Help to resolve would be grand

Ive got the same problem with a Western Digital 500GB My Book Pro on my iMac Ive tried it on a few other machines and I think its happened on them, I say think because it was only when it had happened a couple of time that I started to take notice of circumstances etc and ive only had the drive a week, downloaded what may be a more uptodate "My Button manager" from the WD site still happened but Ive got this idea that it didnt happen on one machine which may not have had the MyButton thing on at that time, have you solved it yet I am using USB at the moment.
20" iMac 2.13Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.8)

External hard drive ejects every time I turn my printer on

I have a new 2x2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro that has 4 external hard drives attached. I have an Epson Stylus Pro 9800 large format printer that I only turn on when I use it. Here is the issue: every time I turn on that Epson printer one- just one (my Seagate FreeAgent) hard drive unceremoniously ejects itself with the accompanying error message about not unplugging the hard drive before you eject it or else you may lose data. Like I said I have 4 (sometimes 5) external hard drives connected to this computer and have no trouble with any of the other drives. In fact one of the other drives is also a Seagate FreeAgent drive and even it never does this. Any thoughts? Should I fear this hard drive crashing?

Hi ravenwoodman;
With the information provide there is no way to give any kind of answer to your question.
You are going to have to provide us with the data on how everything is connected together, including type of bus and any hubs.
Allan

External Hard drive ejects itself

I recently bought a My Passport Essential USB Hard Drive. I backed up all of my music from itunes on it. Now when I try to update my ipod, my external ejects itself. I think it may be because of a lack of power in the usb ports but I'm not sure how to move forward. Can I use firewire on this hard drive or should I purchase a powered usb hub? The drive works fine otherwise.

The best thing for you to do is get a powered USB hub, it will help you i have one that has 5 powered devices pluged into it and it has no problems...
reb19 wrote:
I recently bought a My Passport Essential USB Hard Drive. I backed up all of my music from itunes on it. Now when I try to update my ipod, my external ejects itself. I think it may be because of a lack of power in the usb ports but I'm not sure how to move forward. Can I use firewire on this hard drive or should I purchase a powered usb hub? The drive works fine otherwise.
Brandon
Best Buy Associate | Geek Squad Agent
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External hard drive eject error when computer is asleep

Having some major problems with my iMac. It seems when the iMac goes to sleep I get an error saying the disk hasn't ejected properly. This is not the first hard drive to do so! Several months ago my Buffalo Drive Station would give me that error every night. This was before I was using Mavericks. I decided to upgrade and from that point on my hard drive wasn't recognized at all. I got the disk restored and bought a new Lacie. Everything has been fine for 2 months and now I am getting the same message on my Lacie Drive! I'm afraid whatever is going on is going to ruin the new Lacie.
I've seen some similar problems with other user who have said turning off "Put hard drives to sleep" int the Engery Saver preferences works. But I always had that off. Not sure what to do. Can anyone help?
Running OSX 10.9.2.
Thanks.
E

about once an hour.
That behavior seems somewhat suggestive of the issue described [here|http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/comments/mackeep_waking_on_its_own_try_this/mac_keep_waking_on_its_own_trythis>.
So I would try going to System Preferences>Energy Saver, and if "Wake for network access" is checked, then uncheck it.

External Hard Drive Ejecting itself and now not being recognised

I've been using a Western Digital hard drive for the past 4 months and it's been great. However recently it has decided to randomly eject itself. This was getting irritating but could live with it.
However now it isn't even being recognised by Finder even though it shows up in Disk Utility. I'm puzzled and worried - that hard drive has all my music and photos on but i can't access it
I'd be very grateful for any ideas on how to go about getting it back!?
Thank you!
Chloe

I have the same problem. The Western Digital hard drive doesn't show up on my desktop when I plug it in, although it shows up on disk utility. I would also appreciate any advice on getting my computer to recognize it.

External hard drive unmounts spontaneously.

I have an external RAID 1 setup using AppleRAID 2.0 connected to my Mac Mini (2010) via USB. If I leave it to transfer large amounts of files overnight, it gives me the "disk was not properly ejected" error after about 80GB have been transferred. I have unchecked the "put hard disks to sleep" in settings and I dont even let my screensaver enable. I find that if I'm using it while it's transferring, it wont unmount. I don't want to be sitting here all day babysitting my computer while it transfers files. I've read a few other posts about people with this same issue but nobody is really sure what it is. Is this a bug with the OS?

Hello Jennsy:
Welcome to Apple discussions.
Try this:
Turn your external disk off. Trash a preference file (com.apple.timemachine.plist) and restart. Turn the external disk on. If the external disk is not recognized as a TM disk, go to system preference>time machine>select disk.
Barry
P.S. I do not have a WD disk, but I have read other posts in these forums about people that have had problems with them (FWIW).

I got a macbook pro 2008 and can not back up using time machine. it eject my external hard drive everytime. does someone has a fix???

i got a macbook pro 2008 and can not back up using time machine. it eject my external hard drive everytime. does anybody has a fix???

Does your external hard drive have it's own power supply? It should.
Is your external hard drive formatted with the NTFS file system? It won't work.
It needs to be formatted either with Mac OS Extended or FAT32.
(There are drivers available to add NTFS support to OS X but their quality is unknown, especially the "free" ones.)

I didn't safely eject my external hard-drive and now my files are not showing up on my other computer?

I didn't safely eject my external hard-drive as my imac was in sleep mode and I thought it was shut-down. Now I have turned up to uni and plugged my hard-drive into the uni computers (apple) and the word document I was working on last night (before my computer went to sleep mode, and it may still have been open, I cant remember) is gone.....
I have phoned home and got a family member to try and recover the file. They said they can see it when they open Word under recent documents, however its "ghost" and nothing happens when you click on it.
My question is, when I go home and plug my hard-drive back into my imac, will I be able to recover this word file? or have I lost it forever?

I only saved it to my external hard-drive and saved it at the completion of working on it. However left the document open, went to dinner, and this morning pulled the hard-drive out, whilst the computer was asleep not shut-down and now the file doesn't appear.
I thought when I clicked save then it saved straight away, therefore anything i do after that point (ie a un safe ejection) shouldn't make a difference. Clearly, no matter if you saved the document, if you un-safely eject the hard-drive then the file is lost anyway?

My External hard drive keeps ejecting randomly in Snow Leopard. How do I stop this, and prevent it from happening?

I'm currently running a clean install of Snow Leopard version 10.6.8, and I have done nothing but attempt to mount my external hard drive, which is a Fantom 2 TB Greendrive connected via eSATA through an ExpressCard.
It performed flawlessly in Leopard, and I had no issues with it whatsoever. Then, I performed a clean install of Snow Leopard (erased the drive, and installed via DVD), and when everything had finished, I brought up a finder window, mounted my External Hard drive, and attempted to drag a folder to the desktop. It got to about 15%, and froze. Then, a few seconds later, it told me that I had removed it without ejecting it safely.
It continues to do this every time I try to move a large file to my cleanly installed internal hard drive. It varies on the amount of time it takes to 'eject'. Sometimes the file will get almost halfway there, and then the progress freezes, the 'eject' error is thrown, and my drive dismounts.
The file is about 6.2 GB, and it's vitally important to my livelihood to get this drive working reliably. (It contains CS5 (legitimate copy), as well as extremely important personal files, and i'm a freelance Web Designer and Developer, as well as writer and blogger.)
Short Version:
OS: 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard, clean install)
External: 2TB Fantom Greendrive (eSATA through ExpressCard)
Issue: Randomly ejects drive while transferring larger files.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks so much!
Taylor Daughtry

I have the same issues, The drivers are not great for eSATA right now. I think apple is puting all there effort into Thunderbolt. Ther should be a Thunderbolt to eSATA adaptor soon, untiull then you might want to get a firewire enclosure for you drive as I have had to do.
Maybe you can blog about my app? www.BeautifulClockRadio.com
Mark

My external hard drive won't eject so I can unplug it... and other problems

I bought an external hard drive to use with TM. It is 160 GB Western Digital Travel one. When I initially plugged it in, before I even messed with TM, I partitioned it into 2 drives about 70 GB each, one for TM and one to take stuff off my laptop to create space and store it else where. All was fine and dandy until I turned off my computer and unplugged my external hard drive because I had to take my lap top and didn't want to lug the drive with me. When I plugged it back in and just clicked on TM to see what was available, nothing was there. With it being 2am and me being frustrated I turned it off and am trying to fix it now, except this morning when I plugged in my external hard drive, it can only find my "Extra Stuff" partitioned drive and not my designated "Time Machine Drive" (it doesn't show up on the desktop). I have gone into the disk utility to see if I could repair it, or just erase the TM partition and start over. It currently is trying to "repair" the volume and it says that it is ok, but I didn't know if there were any other suggestions to fix this. It still is not showing up in my desktop.
So far I'm not too impressed with TM. I'm unsure of the best way to disconnect my external hard drive and prevent this from happening again. When I try to simply drag the drive to "eject" to essentially unmount it and then safely unplug it from my USB it asks if I want to "eject all" (meaning the 2 partitioned drives) I click yes and it comes up saying one is still in use. Instead I turn off my computer and unplug it after the computer is off. This is probably a bad idea, but I don't know what else to do. Any suggestions? Do I have to go into the disk utility each time I want to take off my external hard drive and click "unmount"?
Sorry for such a lengthy explanation. Usually programs like this on macs are so simple. TM seems to be less user friendly than their other programs and it has thrown me for a loop.
Message was edited by: larrygal316

I'm having the same issue. Time machine isn't actively running, though just to be sure I turned the service off through the TM utility: no go. Still can't eject. Getting 'resource busy' from umount (sudo umount /dev/disk1s1, that's my external drive name). Umount on the volume says not mounted. Checked activity monitor and couldn't see any time machine processes running, only fsevents, which has to stay running.
I threw the following:
sudo umount -vf /dev/disk1s1
and the drive umounted. -v is verbose, just in case there were any errors thrown I wanted to know, and -f is force umount, which forces the drive to unmount. Check 'man umount' from terminal to see more info on these.
After doing this a couple times (I was doing some testing with some other things to find a faster solution than having to open terminal and umount) it just started umounting correctly. I have no idea why, but it did. So just keep that command in mind, just in case.
Gryyphyn, out.

How do I view and open all my files again that are on my external hard drive?? Error message saying 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer' Three options are Initialize, Ignore or Eject.

I have recently purchased Toshiba 1TB hard drive and I set it up and I was able to transfer all my files onto it such as my music, photos, documents. I had correctly ejected and used it again and all these files were safely stored and accessible afterwards. However after I rebooted my computer as it had been going slow and I had too much clogging it up once I reconnected the external hard drive I have error message saying 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer' Three options are Initialize, Ignore or Eject. How do I access all my files? I set it up to work on both mac and windows. I have tried both another mac and windows computer and same issue occurs?? I am worried that all my personal files are gone but am confused as the drive has had absolutely no damage to it as it was in a very short time frame and its never left the same spot. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Thanks for your quick response. I had a look at your discussion... I tried it on a Windows machine and I thought that was compatible with ExFAT?
Therefore I need to attempt to use my external hard drive with a machine that boasts OS X 10.6.5 or above and then it should work?
Thanks

External Hard Drives Ejecting Spontaneously

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