Is there a solution to external HDD ejecting during backups?

I've used Super Duper. I've used Time Machine. I've tried copying tons of files from one external HDD to another. Every time, the backup crashes and delivers the message that said HDD was not properly ejected. This did not happen with Tiger, but started happening with the upgrade to SL. From everything I've read, it points to a bug in Snow Leopard. If so, has it been fixed?

FWIW, when I said earlier in this thread that I back up every day I'll add here that one of the drives I backup is my boot SSD with no problems.
Here's something I just thought of -- by any chance do these externals have firmware that needs updating for snow leopard (and lion)?  For example, you said it worked on tiger (10.4.x) but you started having problems when you tried snow leopard.  Since you mentioned the model of the WD external I did a little searching and found a WD Software Update page for firmware for WD products.  Perhaps you need that.  I didn't check the LaCie since you didn't specify the exact product and LaCie makes lots of stuff.
Just something I thought I'd mention.

Similar Messages

  • USB3 ONLY external drive ejecting during backup

    This has been discussed and posted in various ways here, but I haven't seen/found a solid solution yet which might be out there.
    Has anyone figured out the solution to a USB3 drive ejecting on it's own?
    My staff's OWC USB3 external portrable hard drive keeps ejecting during any operation: time machine, Carbon Copy, Lightroom, importing, moving files, etc. 
    Attached is a screen shot of the warning box that comes up when the drive ejects itself.
    COMPUTER:
    The machine is a 2012 NON-Retina MBP.
    OSX 10.8.2
    EXTERNAL DRIVE:
    The drive is an OWC Mercury Elite On the Go drive: USB3 only
    http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MSU37750GB16/
    We have used the drive, and cable on my 2011 MBP, OSX 10.7.5 with only USB2 on my machine, and it runs perfectly fine under all conditions.
    ATTEMPTED FIXES:
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    All Updates for OSX
    Re-install OSX
    All updates for 2012 MBP
    Taken to Apple "Genius" bar twice.  They confirm the failures.  Initially blamed the drive/enclousure/cable.  Then blamed that there were firmware and other updates that would fix it....which they did not. 
    YET TO ATTEMPT :
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    I have something similar on a brand new iMac 27" i7 top of the line model.  I bought a USB 3 enclosure from OCW for a 120 gig SSD. I was using it as the cache drive for Photoshop CS6.  It began to display the same issues you are describing. I brushed it off and blamed the cheap enclosure I purchased.  This all occurred 1 week ago on 1-22-2013.
    On Saturday 1-26-2013 I was backing up a sweet sixteen shoot via time machine connected to the USB3 port and the drive ejected mid way of a 70 gig back up. I found that strange because I've never had a problem with that drive or the enclosure it's in. (By the way this is a USB2 enclosure)  I tried it 3 more times and the same issue occurred.  I figured it was the cable and switched it with another USB cable and this time it worked.
    Not thinking much about I assumed the problem was the cable.  The next morning I realized I still had one 8 gig compact flash card in my camera and I needed to back that one up.  This time I used my USB 3 RAW STEEL UDMA card reader to ingest the work. There were only 20 images on the card. During import the compact flash drive froze on the third image. I had to force quit and redo the import again.  It took 3 times before I had no issues importing the images.  I could not figure out what the **** was going on until it hit me. 
    During my trouble shooting I realized the 3 drives were, when they ejected themsleves, connected to the same port in the back of my iMac.  The second one closest to the SD card reader port in the back.  That was the free port I kept switching to use these different peripherals.
    I need to do a little more testing but I'm almost certain something is wrong the the USB3 ports in the back of the new computers. Never had these issues with my late 2009 iMac. 
    The last thing I want to is haul this machine into Apple after it took me 4 days to get it set up the way I use it for my Photography business.
    Disappointed big time!

  • Sudden Time Machine & External HDD Problems -*All Backups gone

    I really hope someone can help...
    Today, I went to backup my MacBook Pro files using Time Machine and my external HDD, as usual.
    Until today, Time Machine and the HDD have been running fine, and today I saw all backups in the HDD going back to September 2011.
    However, today when I tried to backup an error message came up saying there was not enough disk space on the HDD. Here's the error message:
    >>>
    Time Machine could not complete the backup.
    This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 299.79 GB but only 50.95 GB are available.
    Time Machine needs work space on the backup disk, in addition to the space required to store backups. Open Time Machine preferences to select a larger backup disk or make the backup smaller by excluding files.
    <<<
    Nothing would work. So I deleted 1 backup to free some space, but the same error kept coming. I deleted another backup...no go.
    Then all of a sudden all HDD in Finder is showing NO backups/files/folders...nothing!!!
    Time Machine still thinks all the old backups are on the HDD. So does finder, which shows the following for the HDD:
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    Available: 50.95
    Used: 108,747,599,872 bytes (108.75 GB on disk)
    Yet NO backups/files/folders are showing on the HDD under Finder and Time Machine won't recognise the old back-ups — ie, it says "Oldest Backup - None, Latest Backup - None"
    I've tried all sorts of things... including restarting, shutting down, repairing the HDD via Disk Utility etc and the tips here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthre...t=time+machine
    But nothing is helping.
    I really don't know what to do next.
    (BTW, by chance, i did keep two of the old backups that I copied over today from the external HDD to my internal HDD)
    Any suggestions would be appreciated.
    Thank you.

    1. Although I wouldn't recommend what you are asking to do nor do I know if you can do it with the device you are buying (if it has its own RAID card you may not be able to do anything with it.) However, for a software RAID using Disk Utility you would need to partition each drive before creating any RAIDs. Let's assume you partition each drive into two volumes. Call them A1 and B1 and A2 and B2. Then you can create one RAID using A1 and A2, and a second RAID using B1 and B2. Keep in mind that you cannot access two partitions on a single drive simultaneously, so when trying to access one RAID you will find that you lose any RAID speed benefits when trying to access the other RAID to, say, copy data from one RAID to the other or when trying to copy data to both RAIDs from another source.
    2. If a RAID is connected to a FireWire port or to the USB port on the AEBS, then it can be used as a TM backup drive. TM can only have one backup volume on any one computer, but multiple computers can backup to the same TM backup drive or to other backup drives, but it would be more efficient for all the computers to backup to the same TM volume. TM will backup each computer separately into discrete folders on the backup drive.
    In my opinion I would recommend having a single 2 TB RAID volume that is connected either to a FireWire port on one of the networked computers (and set up as a shared drive) or connected to the USB port on the AEBS. Each computer can then backup wirelessly to the drive except for the computer to which the drive is connected via FireWire, if that's how you choose to set it up.

  • External drive ejected during "consolidate library" attempt

    I have a recent mac mini running mountain lion with a 1 tb g drive connected via firewire 800 and a 2 tb seagate connected via usb.  The original itunes files are on the gdrive.  I want to consolidate and back up the music files to the Seagate but in the middle of the consolidation, the g drive spontaneously ejects and I get an error message saying i have ejected it improperly.  I had settings on so computer would not go to sleep so its not that.  I have run disk utility on both external drives, no errors.  I had this happen twice while trying to consolidate library and twice while trying a simple drag and drop of the itunes folder.  What's the deal?  Can anyone help?  Has anyone had this problem?
    rabbit

    I have something similar on a brand new iMac 27" i7 top of the line model.  I bought a USB 3 enclosure from OCW for a 120 gig SSD. I was using it as the cache drive for Photoshop CS6.  It began to display the same issues you are describing. I brushed it off and blamed the cheap enclosure I purchased.  This all occurred 1 week ago on 1-22-2013.
    On Saturday 1-26-2013 I was backing up a sweet sixteen shoot via time machine connected to the USB3 port and the drive ejected mid way of a 70 gig back up. I found that strange because I've never had a problem with that drive or the enclosure it's in. (By the way this is a USB2 enclosure)  I tried it 3 more times and the same issue occurred.  I figured it was the cable and switched it with another USB cable and this time it worked.
    Not thinking much about I assumed the problem was the cable.  The next morning I realized I still had one 8 gig compact flash card in my camera and I needed to back that one up.  This time I used my USB 3 RAW STEEL UDMA card reader to ingest the work. There were only 20 images on the card. During import the compact flash drive froze on the third image. I had to force quit and redo the import again.  It took 3 times before I had no issues importing the images.  I could not figure out what the **** was going on until it hit me. 
    During my trouble shooting I realized the 3 drives were, when they ejected themsleves, connected to the same port in the back of my iMac.  The second one closest to the SD card reader port in the back.  That was the free port I kept switching to use these different peripherals.
    I need to do a little more testing but I'm almost certain something is wrong the the USB3 ports in the back of the new computers. Never had these issues with my late 2009 iMac. 
    The last thing I want to is haul this machine into Apple after it took me 4 days to get it set up the way I use it for my Photography business.
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  • Restore External HDD from TM Backup

    My External drive with my iPhoto and iTunes libraries died. The drive fell down from a table, and since then it is not recognized -- I thought these kind of drives had shock protection.
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  • Airport and external HDD

    I am new to Mac. Had been on Win PC ever since I used a computer.
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    Thanks in advance
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    Hi Niel
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  • TC and AE with external HDD?

    It´s not possible to make a backup on a HDD that is connected to the TC. But If I have a TC and add a Airport Extreme with an external HDD connected to the AE. Is it possible to include the external HDD into the backup that the TC does?

    Is it possible to include the external HDD into the backup that the TC does?
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  • IMac keep ejecting my 2TB external HDD but in safe boot mode it is totally fine. How to resolve the problem?

    Hi,
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    Thanks Allan for your reply!
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  • How to avoid TM to back up entire external HDD to TC again after eject/reconnect to MacBook Air?

    I back up my MacBook Air internal HDD and an additional external HDD plugged into the USB port of the MacBook Air to my Time Capsule using Time Machine. However, if I remove/eject the external HDD and then reconnect it TM tries to backup the entire contents of the external HDD again.
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    Pondini wrote:
    kanitzky wrote:
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  • External HDD: Shows not ejected properly when the drive is still present

    Hi,
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    Hi All,
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    Go through the below forum with similar issue and follow the process mentioned by "Macjack" in the beginning.
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  • Upgraded to Mavericks. Now External HDD Enclosure Won't Mount. Is there a fix?

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