Have to force eject thumb drive

Ever since I purchased this iMac Retina I have been unable to normally eject a thumb drive that I use to copy work files to my home computer. I do this transfer on daily basis and this issue is becoming tiresome.
A previous 2011 iMac did not have this issue.
I did transfer all files from the 2011 iMac, via a time machine backup, to the iMac Retina during setup. Don't know if this is the issue.
I get the error that something is in use, but there are no programs being run that are related to the files being transferred. It is simply a drag and drop and eject process.
I have logged out and also rebooted which does release the drive, but I really don't want to have to go through this five times a week
Any ideas/help appreciated.
Thank you!!!

Hi a brody,
Thanks for responding. I went through my process again this evening and had the activity monitor open while doing so. I hopefully was looking in the right place per your suggestion. I did not see the specific file you mentioned. I did watch the activity as I inserted, copied files and attempted ejecting. I did not see any change in the list. Had I found the file you mentioned I would not have known what to do about it. Were you suggesting that it would have been a simple exercise and there would be nothing to do to solve my issue?

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10.7.5 Have to Force Eject Ext USB Drive After Sleep

Macbook Pro, Late 2011 (USB 2)
I'm finding that I always have to force eject two different 1TB ext USB HDD's after the computer sleeps. Sometimes I think it's even only after the drive spins down for a while.
Most often it's after I let Time Machine backup my laptop overnight.
I thought it was just this drive, until I got a new drive and it has the same problem, though it's not used for backups.
I've been unsuccessful trying to determine what may be using the drive as the eject error states is happening, but maybe that would help me understand if this is a legitimate problem or a bug. Force ejecting has had no noticeable effects, though it makes me extremely nervous on a backup volume. The other disk is a huge sample library that's not written to unless I add samples, so I don't force ejecting that one as much.
In searches for this problem I have only turned up drives that eject spontaneously.
Thanks for any help.

OK, so a new search in here, not via google, found this:
sudo lsof /Volumes/{volume name}
result:
COMMAND PID   USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
mds      67   root   21r   DIR   14,6      544    2 /Volumes/Backup_1TB
Finder 152 andrew   55r   DIR   14,6      204   88 /Volumes/Backup_1TB/Backups.backupdb
So it looks like spotlight or finder. I'm not browsing the backup volume, but it looks like it thinks I am. I know there are lots of spotlight issues, too, but I;m not sure if that's the case here.
I did try:
mdutil -V /Volumes/Backup_1TB/ -s
/Volumes/Backup_1TB:
    No index.
/Volumes/Backup_1TB/Backups.backupdb:
    No index.
So it would appear that spotlight isn't doing anything...

Why do I have to force eject a USB Drive?

I'm trying to make a bootable flash drive for OS X Mavericks but I try to partition my flash drive and it won't let me. It comes up with an error that says this:
Can anyone help me? I try to eject the disk but every time i have to force eject because it says that one or more processes are using the flash drive. Thanks.

Have you tried unchecking the "automatically check for newly published albums" checkbox in prefs / web. Do this for each online account. This worked for me. The source to this solution was on Flickr.

Eject thumb drive or sd card

When I eject the sd card or thumb drive it does not eject. Rather I recieve a message stating that Finder is using the device and I have to exit Finder. So, I exit finder and then come back to eject and I get the same message. If I select another set of files in Finder and then go down and eject the drive, same message. Finnally I just remove the drive and I get a message saying that I should eject the drive before removing it. Seems like a Catch 22 scenario. Any one know what I am doing wrong.
Thanks

Maybe this one http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/27871/whatsopen can help you finding what is preventing the eject.
Stefan

I have a new USB thumb drive that works in my 2010 iMac but not in my 2012 MacBook Pro

Today I purchased an 'autodrive' usb thumbdrive at Staples. The drive works fine on my mid 2010 iMac, and my Asus Netbook running Windows 7. However, it is not recognized at all by System Information or Disk Utility on my mid 2012 Macbook Pro. Both Macs are running Mountain Lion 10.8.2.
If I connect my 2 year old SanDisk USB thumb drive to the same USB port on my Macbook Pro, it is immediately recognized and a finder window opens. The SanDisk drive is also recognized properly by the iMac and the Netbook.
Is there any way to further debug this issue to get a better idea of why the device is not being recognized by the Macbook Pro?
Thanks,
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I am having this exact same problem with my New MBP 15" quad core 2.6GHz i7 on 10.8.2. I have other thumb drives that work, but an older thumb drive that works on my prior MBP 15" 2.7GHz dual core i7 on 10.7 and XP and Windows 8 laptops isn't recognized at all by the newer MBP. This thumbdrive is only 256MB and may be USB 1, but USB 1 stuff should work on a USB3 interface unless it's a bug. I've freshly formatted the drive and tested it with disk utility on the older MBP, so it's an issue with the newer Mac's USB controller or MacOS 10.8.2
I suspect a bug.

What is the best way to shut down an iMac that has frozen during a data transfer? The disk I was writing to will not eject. Stopping "copy items to" doesn't work either_ it is frozen as well. Is there a way to force eject the disk so I can shut down?

Some more information on the above: OS: 7.2
1. None of the shutdown commands would work so I held the power button down and received a prompt that asked if I wished to force eject the drive, I selected
the force eject and then shut down.
2. Just recently I installed an eSATA _ Thunderbolt_ port multiplier compliant PCIe card (Seritek Q6G) into a thunderbolt external chassis (OWC Helios) (seritek Q6G).
This freeze data transfer also happened when I connected a Firmtek 5PM external tower to the iMac via thunderbolt cable.
The driver for the seritek Q6G was installed in the iMac previous to connection of any of the devices.
Both external towers mount ok on the iMac but have frozen during data transfer.
The initial freeze was with the Firmtek 5PM which is (JBOD)_ I thought that might have had something to do with the freeze_ it being JBOD_ so next I tried the Mercury Elite AL Pro Q2- which is formated in RAID 5. But then froze too.
Anybody have any experience with this?
Maybe I need another driver?
Or maybe some update to my OS?
Any suggestions welcomed.
Thank you

Hello BDAqua, thanx for the suggestions. Before I saw this reply I tried to first quit the finder and then to relaunch the Finder but that resulted was a blank gray screen.
In the end I ended up having to power down the iMac.
Fortunately the RAID array that was "active" seems to be fine and also has a firewire 800 connection so I can use it_ just not with thunderbolt until this issue is solved.
I'm going to check in the Applications>Utilities>system log to see if any clues are evident_ thank you for the suggestion.
PS: Nothing of note was obvious as a root cause in the Activity Monitor though.
hmmm....I was told that the Helios and seritek card were compatable and that the Helios didn't require any drivers..it will be a drag if there isn't an easy fix for this since this new PCIe card from seritek is the first to offer port multiplier compatibility for eSATA to thunderbolt...since they are both new I'm hoping that an OS upgrade will be the fix (presently7.2)...we shall see.

Copy from thumb drive to external hard drive fails - "file is in use"

I have photos on a thumb drive formatted MS-DOS FAT16 from a windows machine, all are .jpg files and I'm trying to copy them to one of two partitions on an external LaCie hard drive, formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The other partition is used only for Time Machine.
With absolutely nothing else running except The Finder, when I try to directly copy them by dragging a folder of them from the thumb drive window onto the external drive window, it starts up a copy, then returns the error "Cannot complete the copy because the file "<<imagename>>.jpg" is in use. <<imagename>> is always the first item in the folder being copied.
Sharing & Permissions for the folders and all images inside are "Read & Write" privileges for (Me) (unknown) and everyone.
I can successfully drag a folder of images from the thumbdrive to my MacBook Pro (10.5.8) desktop and they copy fine. When I then try to drag the folder from the desktop to the external drive, I get the same "in use" error message.
I've used Disk Utility to repair disk permissions and repair disk on my MacBook Pro, repair disk on the thumb drive and repair disk on the external hard drive. All are fine - same error occurs.
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This article describes moving your music to another drive, it may be of some help: iTunes for Windows - Moving your iTunes Music Folder

Boot Camp crashes after the windows software support download is finished and before the software is installed on the thumb drive

I have previously installed Boot Camp on this Computer (MBP mid 2012, 15" 2.6 GHZ). I recently replaced the hard drive and was reestablishing bootcamp again. While Boot Camp is writing to the USB thunb drive it crashes and rebootrs. The crash does not generate and message other than a note that there has been an error and the computer is restarting. I have tried several different thumb drives all with the same result. It makes me think that the new hard drive (a Seagate Momentus XT 750GB 7200 rpm unit) does not work with Boot Camp. Does anyone have any thoughts or solutions?

Hi,
I solved the problem myself. This might help others.
Recap:
The Windows XP Pro CD was always ejected by Boot Camp and it wouldn't mount at all when inserted in the CD slot. The CD was however readable on a Windows Machine.
It was not easy to detect but the Windows CD was physically deformed. It wasn't flat. It was a little convex (the outer edge was higher than its center). My iMac wasn't able to read it at all but a PC was able until I decided to test it with a full install on the PC. About half way during the installation, it stopped and an error message was displayed by Windows Setup "Disc Read Error - Disc might be damaged".
I ejected the CD and discovered the deformation. So I carefully placed the outer edge of the CD over a ring and put some weight on its center to try to undo the deformation. I've waited 2 days then retested the CD and it worked at the first attempt. My iMac was happy and so was I. I made a security copy of the CD while it's still readable in case I have to re-install later.
I find Microsoft cheap of putting their Installation CD in a paper sleeve. If the CD have been stored in a CD case this would not have happened.
End of the story.

Can I format a thumb drive to work on a mac?

I have a number of thumb drives that are formatted for windows (dos I suppose), is it possible to reformat them to work with my intel imac?

No need to format unless the Mac can't read/write to it.
Most thumb drives are already formatted FAT32 (MSDOS) and Mac's can read and write to them no problem just like PC's can.
It's when you need to boot from one (or not allow most PC's to read it as it will need extra paid software) that it has to be GUID/OS X ext J (HFS+) formatted.

Ibook not ejecting flash drive

Hello all, I have a problem ejecting flash drives from my ibook g4 12" 1.33 ghz. Whenever there is one plugged in, the light on it is always on and when I try to eject it, it says that it is in use and that it cannot be ejected. I have Norton AV software on my ibook so I don't know if this will affect it. Please send me some suggestions. Thanks.

In addition, some flashdrives have two components.
My SanDisk has only one desktop icon, but my Memorex has two icons, for some reason.
If a flashdrive mounts with two icons, draw a circle around both with the mouse to select both, and drag both to the trash.
As noted, the lights mean little, and on some flashdrives, the light is on the underside and cannot easily be seen.
I wait for a minute or so before removing the drive after ejecting it.

USB thumb drive shows up twice

Dear all,
I have a 1GB USB thumb drive which always mounts in the finder twice:
i.e.
I am talking about the finder window and the desktop: once I have plugged in the usb stick it then shows two connections to the stick:
one is called:
USBDISKPRO
the other is called:
NO NAME
I just got my G5 and I have partitioned my disk, though I dont think this has any influence on my problem...
the problem is exactly the same as the one mentioned last october (please see here below) in this forum but has not been aswered.
I hope I have more luck.
thank you!
Hynek
USB Thumb Drive shows up twice
Posted: Oct 11, 2005 10:07 AM
I have a 64MB USB thumb drive (the only name on it I can see is VeriTest, which might be the name of some company that was giving them away) which always mounts on the desktop twice. I have used drive utility to re-format it (but even in drive utility it shows up twice).
On a 10.3 machine yesterday I reformatted it while zeroing out all the data and it only showed up once. But today when plugged back into my 10.4 machine, it shows up twice again.
It also gets weirder... I can look at either "drive" and delete the file that is on there, but it does not get deleted on the second drive - so the two of them seem to get out of sync. I cannot, however, empty the trash because it says the item in the trash is in use.
I know it's just a 64MB little thingy, but I find it quite useful (but this is annoying when I have to reformat to erase a file)... Any ideas?
Ben
G5 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

My guess is that the PC isn't showing you the second partition at all. If a drive is partitioned, the correct behavior is to show it as two separate volumes. If your PC is not showing the second volume, so showing them both as one volume, either way your PC is behaving incorrectly.
Did you install some software on your PC to use your thumb drive? When mine is inserted into a PC, it automatically installs software to manage the secure partition. Maybe yours has some kind of similar software that makes it appear as a single volume.

Format a New USB Thumb Drive

I have a new USB thumb drive I just picked up and I was able to mount in to my Linux machine fine:
dmesg | grep -i "OCZ"
scsi 10:0:0:1: Direct-Access OCZ SD0StorageDevice 0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdd] 15794176 512-byte logical blocks: (8.08 GB/7.53 GiB)
It mounts fine on my system:
[carlos@tuna ~]$ sudo mount /dev/sdd usb/
Password:
[carlos@tuna ~]$ cd usb/
[carlos@tuna usb]$ ls -l
total 80
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 16384 Mar 30 10:12 cisco
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Apr 19 08:50 files
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Apr 23 15:46 mail
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 16384 Apr 23 15:49 pics
Now I would like to wipe and reformat the entire drive since I backed up the data. However before I reformat the drive, how can I set the label name into the format command while formatting as fat32? I don't need to use FDISK since I am not changing anything in regards to the partition table / chunk size. I just want to format as fat32 however I don't have mkfs.msdos or mkfs.fat32 on my Arch Linux system. I checked the Wiki and didn't find anything nor did any search thread results.
Anyone know what package I need to format fat32 & how I can set a label name so when it's mounted, I can see a specific name for the drive?

Carlwill wrote:
sudo mount /dev/sdd usb/
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -i ocz_usb /dev/sdd1
me spots some inconsistencies. i'd bet if you used gparted instead, it'd warn you and say something like "create DOS Partition table first" or somesuch.
i dunno, this is the one area i like the wipe-my-ass-for-me bloat , could be worth a try.

Thumb drive works on MacBook Pro but not on Mac desk top

I have bought two separate thumb drives that are MAC/PC compatible. They will work on my MacBook Pro but not my desk top Mac. Both are less than a year old. Desk top will read older thumb drives w/o problems, but not the new ones.

Model Name:          iMac
Model Identifier:          iMac11,3
Processor Name:          Intel Core i5
Processor Speed:          2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors:          1
Total Number Of Cores:          4
L2 Cache (per core):          256 KB
L3 Cache:          8 MB
Memory:          4 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed:          4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version:          IM112.0057.B00
SMC Version (system):          1.59f2
Serial Number (system):          QP05*****NR
Hardware UUID:          282E0143-F041-56A4-8A82-C*****A59
Is there anything else you need to trouble shoot this?
Melissa
<Edited by Host>

After deleting some unnecessary Apps in my Macbook Pro, I plugged my thumb drive to discover that I can't open my files, which I normally can, because they've turned into ".lnk" files. Please help.

I have files in my thumb drive that I cant open. Inside my thumb drive, I've organized files in folders but I have files I havent put in folders yet. Those files turned into .lnk files.
My theory is, my thumb drive caught a virus from another laptop because I copied files from my colleagues laptop.

There are no viruses for a Mac, new theory required. .lnk files are aliases to a file, what did you delete?

Unable to initialize Thumb drive using Disk Utility!

Hi All,
I have a 4GB Sandisk thumb drive that works flawlessly till I tried to initialize it using Disk Utility in my MBP.
Now, whenever I try to connect the drive to USB port, system ask me to initialize the disk but when I try to initialize system goes into an unfinite loop of unmounting the disk.
And now when I try to format it using Windows, the message appears that "Unable to complete the format". The disk was working in both Windows and Mac prior to I used initialize function.
Any help would begreatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
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Hi Samberl,
As I already wrote in my initial post that the drive was working before I try to intialize using MBP. Anyways, I already followed your advice and replaced the drive with a new one. But now I am worried if I again use it in my Mac and initialize using disk utility. As of now I have formatted it using Windows and using NTFS-3G in my MAC to read or write the data.
Anyways, thanks for helping

Have to force eject thumb drive

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