External Drives will not dismount

[Sdladnier]

I am having trouble, none of my external drives will dismount from my Macbook Pro running all the latest updates to leapord (2.5 GHz C2D).

I ran into this problem 2 days ago when using Drive Genius to format free space on my 1Tb external drive in doing so it froze and I was forced for force quit the application in the middle of the process. Afterwords the partitions on the drive that I did not mess with still mounted properly but I was unable to do anything with the "free space" as it showed it as formatted but would not mount. I went into OS X disk util and tried the reformat the partition that would not mount but OS X always told me that it was unable to dismount the drive.

I finally decided to use Mac drive in VMWare Fusion to repartition the drive and format it and did it succesfully but the drive will no longer mount leaving me down a drive. It shows in Disk Util that the drive is there but it shows the partition as labeled 1Tb Backup but the icon is a blank page instead of a drive icon. After the whole mess up with drive genius on that drive none of my USB or FW externals want to dismount it always gives me the error, I have tried repairing permissions and restarting and a cold start to no avail. Also I have noticed that some drive images after ejecting them seem to stay in finder until I restart finder. I have also used Onyx to rebuild the spotlight index thinking it was keeping the drives in use.

If you have any ideas that I should try please let me know as this is starting to become tiresome and I have run out of ideas to search on Google.

Also below I have added the info 1Tb drive and how OS X sees it if it is any help.

Name : 1TB Backup
Type : Volume

Disk Identifier : disk3s3
Mount Point : /Volumes/1TB Backup
File System : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Connection Bus : USB
Device Tree : /PCI0/EHC2@1A,7/@4:3
Writable : Yes
Universal Unique Identifier : A97C9EAF-E18F-3BE3-80CD-8A8C6FB6E8E7
Capacity : 931.4 GB (1,000,070,627,328 Bytes)
Free Space : 931.2 GB (999,818,838,016 Bytes)
Used : 0 Bytes
Number of Files : 0
Number of Folders : 0
Owners Enabled : No
Can Turn Owners Off : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : Yes
Supports Journaling : Yes
Journaled : Yes
Disk Number : 3
Partition Number : 3

 

[J the Ninja]

Anything strange showing up in the log when you try to dismount them?

 

[Sdladnier]

Still kinda new to the whole Mac thing where would I find the log you are referring to? I have only been using a Mac for about a year now reseaching and learning as I go.

 

[J the Ninja]

Still kinda new to the whole Mac thing where would I find the log you are referring to? I have only been using a Mac for about a year now reseaching and learning as I go.

/Applications/Utilities/Console.app

Simple, graphical log reader. Probably one of the handiest troubleshooting tools OS X has. I wish someone had told me about this when I first got my Mac. All the logs are in the sidebar. system.log is probably the one where you'd see stuff about device problems.

 

[Sdladnier]

These are the only things that stand out and they are refreshing so fast its hard to catch anything when I eject a drive, although boxee and folding at home have both been removed from my preferences pane


Feb 16 17:32:05 shawn-ladniers-macbook-pro com.apple.launchd[94] (tv.boxee.helper[52602]): posix_spawnp("/Applications/Boxee.app/Contents/Resources/Boxee/bin/boxeeservice", ...): No such file or directory
Feb 16 17:32:05 shawn-ladniers-macbook-pro com.apple.launchd[94] (tv.boxee.helper[52602]): Exited with exit code: 1
Feb 16 17:32:05 shawn-ladniers-macbook-pro com.apple.launchd[94] (tv.boxee.helper): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Feb 16 17:32:09 shawn-ladniers-macbook-pro com.apple.launchd[1] (edu.stanford.folding.client[52604]): posix_spawnp("/Applications/Folding@home.app/fah6", ...): No such file or directory
Feb 16 17:32:09 shawn-ladniers-macbook-pro com.apple.launchd[1] (edu.stanford.folding.client[52604]): Exited with exit code: 1
Feb 16 17:32:09 shawn-ladniers-macbook-pro com.apple.launchd[1] (edu.stanford.folding.client): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Edit:
I managed to catch it in time when I try to eject the drives and this is the only things it shows in system.log
Feb 16 17:39:40 shawn-ladniers-macbook-pro /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder[52189]: StatusMonitor::volumesChangedCallBack returned -47
Feb 16 17:39:40: --- last message repeated 1 time ---
Feb 16 17:39:40 shawn-ladniers-macbook-pro /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin[50723]: StatusMonitor::volumesChangedCallBack returned -47
Feb 16 17:39:48: --- last message repeated 1 time ---

Second Edit:
I searched and found out how to remove the .plists from boxee and folding@home logged in and out and and the drives now properly dismount, I assume that one of the two were polling the drives in some way keeping them "busy" why it only started when I had the crash in drive genius makes no sense to me but it works now and thanks for the heads up on the console logs

 

[sickmacdoc]

Just a heads up-- a cool little free utility to download and keep in your utility tool bag for future problems with ejecting/dismounting drives is called "What's Keeping Me?". It makes it simple to find out what is defeating your desire to eject a drive and can, speaking from experience (), keep you from going crazy when you just can't see what is holding it up.

 

[DoFoT9]

there are a couple of things..

1. Finder
2. Spotlight
3. Connected computers that havent been disconnected (only if you share the drive)
4. Virus scanning programs (Norton grrrr)
5. Other programs still open that were reading from it (e.g. word, etcetc)
6. Time Machine

I find there is always a program open or i have connected to the drive from a remote computer, if that happens i shut the programs that have been open and turn off a process called AppleFileServer (This is done in Activity Monitor).

 

[Sdladnier]

Thanks sickmacdoc downloaded and installed "what's keeping me" for future use

edit:
misspelling