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Cannot Get an internal Hard Drive to Unmount

R

rosindabow

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 3, 2007
15
0
I have 4 internal hard drives inside my Mac Pro. Three of them are 2Tb Hitachi drives and the other is the internal drive that came with the machine. One of my drives will not unmount - it says it might be in use by another application. I have tried Disk Utility and Drive Genius with no luck. It is being backed up by Super Duper so I know I have a copy. There is approximately 1.1 TBs of data or about 56% full. It is also not copying files in or out easily. I dragged over 4 audio files of maybe 80 MBs in size and it would not copy them into a folder. But when I dragged them to the icon, it copied in under a second. I must also tell you that Spotlight is endlessly indexing and I cannot turn it off. I have dropped it into Privacy, I have used Spotless to turn it off and even used the sudo mdutil on/off in Terminal to try to stop the indexing - no luck. I cloned another external 2 TB firewire drive and Drive Genius can unmount and rebuild that without a hitch. So it can copy but there is obviously something wrong here.

Update: I've started off of another system drive and used both Drive Geius and Tech Tool 5 to rebuild and clean up my internal system drive - no change. I tried to re-format the offending drive and I was not able to - got an error code of -1407. Then I approached it differently. I own a NewerTech VoyagerQ which I can put bare drives in. I removed the drive from the Mac Pro and inserted into the NewerTech bay and it appeared as a firewire drive. I ran Disk Utility and it was able to repair it. Then I tried to run Disk Utility again and it wouldn't unmount. It seemed to be okay for a moment but then failed again. I tried the same thing with Drive Genius and it would not unmount - very strange. So, I cannot even re-initialize the drive ... and yet it works (sort of) not enough so that I could fully trust it. By the way, it's only 2 months old.

I'm at my wits end - got nothing else to try - any ideas?
 
Last edited:
Those are all classic signs on drive failure. (read/write issues, slow performance, having troubles unmounting, unable to repair...)

That was good thinking putting in the Voyager Q drive dock, but if its having the same troubles there then its gotta be a bad drive.

You might try using USB instead of Firewire with you Voyager Q... for whatever reason I've always had better luck with OWC's sleds with USB when the drive is having troubles.

Good news is that your drive is only 2 months old, so its going to be under warranty with Hitachi.

Hitachi website:
http://www.hgst.com

Support Phone:
1-800-448-2244
1-408-717-8087

Support Email:
support_usa@hitachigst.com

Good luck!
 
Butler Trumpet said:
Yeah thats a good point... I wonder how the flooding there has affected their RMA turnaround time.
Click to expand...

I handle 200 hdds in a years time.

so from year to year I can have one or two(good year) returns or 10-20

(bad year seagates new 2008-2009 2.5 inch 500 gb hdd was a POS).

So far 1 return since the flood.
one of the 2009 seagate 500gb 7200 rpm hdds!
They were fast and sent a hdd with an oct 2011 date.

I am sure that some people have had to wait for some drives. I was lucky with the seagate.
 
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