iTunes and an external hardrive problem

I don't know how to solve your problem, but the diskutil command may make it less painful to eject it. Maybe it will even give some informational message if it can't eject it.

In Terminal.app, type 'man diskutil' to get all of the details. Use 'diskutil list' to display all your disks and partitions. Here are some subcommands that might be handy. When it mentions volumes here I think it means what we usually call partitions (at least it seems so on my system). I'd start with the unmountDisk and eject subcommands, and leave the unmount force as a last resort...

Code:

     unmount | umount [force] device
                Unmount a single volume.  Force will force-unmount the volume
                (less kind to any open files; see also umount (8)).

     unmountDisk | umountDisk [force] device
                Unmount an entire disk (all volumes).  Force will force-
                unmount the volumes (less kind to any open files; see also
                umount (8)).


     eject device
                Eject a disk.  Media will become offline for the purposes of
                being a data store for file systems or being a member of con-
                structs such as software RAID or direct data.  Additionally,
                removable media will become eligible for safe manual removal;
                automatically-removable media will begin its physical (motor-
                ized) eject sequence.

 

I was curious about how to find the process that might be preventing the eject. If you don't mind using Terminal, I think I have an easy way to find any process that has any file open on a particular drive. That doesn't itself solve your iTunes purchasing problem, but if you know what process it is maybe it would provide some clue about that problem. At the very least you can terminate the process to do a normal eject (if that's still required to clear up the iTunes problem) instead of a force eject.

Basically, I used the lsof command to find the PID(s) of processes having open files on my external drive, then used the PID(s) in the ps command to get the path and filename of the process. Then you could use kill to terminate that process and (hopefully) you can eject the drive normally and maybe even fix your iTunes problem.

I don't know how familiar you are with the command line. Here are some examples: lsof provides lots of neat info about open files. The PID of the process holding the file open is the second column:

Code:

lsof /Volumes/disk-name/

(alternatively you could get the list of every open file and pipe it to grep.)

Get the PID from the second column, and substitute it into the command below:

Code:

ps -ef | grep your-pid

That'll give you the full path and name of the process' executable. From there you can use kill on it.

 

How can someone possibly fill a 1TB hard drive with songs, videos and apps?

 

Erm, he said 2TB, that doubles it.

Actually he said 2tb which is 250GB.

 

2 TB = 2000 GB right?

 

No.

TB or Tb, TerraByte or Terrabit, one byte is 8 bits.

And 2TB = 2048 GB not 2000 GB.

 

Crap again.

 

Oh Terabyte.. That makes sense now.