external drives will not eject!

[twobikeminimum]

Is it me or is Leopard just buggy when it comes to external drives?

I recently had a problem with my external drives unmounting permanently when Leopard put them to sleep. This appears to have been solved by unchecking the "put hard drives to sleep when possible" box in system preferences, but now I have an issue with not being able to eject my drives!

When I try to dismount the drives I get the "drive is in use and cannot be ejected. try closing applications, yadda, yadda, yadda" message. But I have nothing running and Activity Monitor doesn't show any likely background operations in play. I hate to keep powering down my drives when I need to unmount them, but is there any other option?

Determined to dismount drive,
David

 

[drichards]

WD Drive Monitor was killing me with that. It was installed on one of my external drives, and shoved its way into being auto-launched at mount. Ultimately, I destroyed all traces of it, and all is well.

 

[plinden]

Something is keeping a reference to a file on your external drive open. Try What's Keeping Me

I actually haven't used this - I use lsof from the command line when I get issues like yours, but give it a go and see if helps.

 

[twobikeminimum]

Something is keeping a reference to a file on your external drive open. Try What's Keeping Me

Ah, nice! This is exactly what I'm looking for. Will give it a try. Thanks a million!