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Unable to Eject External HDD

F

flashmore

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 4, 2012
4
0
When I'm attempting to eject my external HDD, I receive a message saying

"The disk “SAMSUNG_1” wasn’t ejected because one or more programs may be using it."

I've run a command in terminal to find out what's keeping it open, but I don't know what the results mean....

Code: 
COMMAND PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
mds      67 root   11r   DIR   14,7     2142    5 /Volumes/SAMSUNG_1

Can anybody help me please?
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,162
15,654
California
Looks like the drive is being indexed by Spotlight. If you don't want that drive indexed open the Spotlight pane in System Prefs and add the drive to the Privacy tab. That will stop the indexing and you can eject.
 
F

flashmore

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 4, 2012
4
0
I just tried that but I'm still getting the same response when I try to eject.
 
F

flashmore

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 4, 2012
4
0
That MDSWORKER thing didn't show up, but I managed to kill MDS. When I tried to eject though I got the same error and when I run the sudo lsof command, MDS showed up again but it had a different PID & FD value.
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,162
15,654
California
You should be able to see mdworker if you click on show all processes in Activity Monitor. Usually there are two running, one for your user account and one for spotlight.
 
F

flashmore

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 4, 2012
4
0
As soon as I've force quit MDS, it pops right back up in the activity monitor with a different PID value. MDWORKER pops back up after a short time too.

I've also gone into system preferences and prevented spotlight from searching the external drive but that hasn't done anything to help. :confused:
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,162
15,654
California
flashmore said:
As soon as I've force quit MDS, it pops right back up in the activity monitor with a different PID value. MDWORKER pops back up after a short time too.

I've also gone into system preferences and prevented spotlight from searching the external drive but that hasn't done anything to help. :confused:
Click to expand...

Both MDS and MDWORKER will always relaunch when quit.

If you are not copying anything to the drive, just unplug the connection and it won't hurt anything.

You might remount after that and use Disk Util to check the disk for errors.
 
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