Posted on 8/22/11

MacMost Forum / External Hard Drive Won't Eject Normally

I do manual, not automatic, Time Machine backups, while running Lion and using an external hard drive attached to my iMac.
When the backup completes, I right-click on the icon representing the hard drive and select ‘Eject G-Drive Mini’. However, then I get the message ‘The disk “G-Drive Mini” wasn’t ejected because one or more programs may be using it’
It then gives me the option of doing a ‘Force Eject’ of this drive, which I then sometimes do.
But my question for the forum is: how can I find out what program may be using the G-Drive Mini? Since it is done with the time machine backup and since I have closed that preference pane, I doubt that Time Machine is still using the external drive. But how can I find out for sure?
—–
Richard Fuhr

7 Responses to “External Hard Drive Won’t Eject Normally”

  1. Gary Rosenzweig says:
    8/22/11 at 1:58 pm

    This has been reported by many people.
    I believe it has to do with Spotlight indexing the drive — a new feature of Lion where you can use Spotlight to search Time Machine backups.
    So it is your system using the drive. Best to just leave it connected.

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  2. Richard Fuhr says:
    8/25/11 at 9:23 am

    Indeed, it is Spotlight indexing the drive. I checked via the following Terminal command on August 22

    sudo lsof | grep Volumes | grep Spotlight

    and saw many entries involving mds ( which is the metadata server program that manages the indexing) and

    /Volumes/G-DRIVE Mini/.Spotlight-V100

    I have checked from time to time, and the indexing has been going on continuously ever since then, including now, which is three days later.

    Is this normal? Should I just let it continue, even if it takes a few more days? What have others’ experiences been?

    Reply To This Comment
    • Gary Rosenzweig says:
      8/25/11 at 9:25 am

      Yes, I believe it is normal. I think Lion has new abilities to be able to search your Time Machine backups that weren’t there before. But it will take a while for it to index your entire backup drive. After that, it may use the drive less as it only has to deal with updates.

      Reply To This Comment
  3. Richard Fuhr says:
    8/25/11 at 9:30 am

    Gary, Thanks for your quick reply; I appreciate it.

    In this case, the drive being indexed has a capacity of 499.76 GB of which 415.82 GB have already been used, which could explain the lengthy time needed to perform the indexing. I will keep the drive connected and let the indexing continue.

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  4. Mr Anthony Cotton says:
    8/25/11 at 12:50 pm

    I have 3 external hard drives. My Book, i always leave that one alone. WD My Passport i have no trouble with that one. The Iomega i do have trouble with that one. Warning comes up saying 1 or 2 applications may be using it. The main one is when emptying trash or transferring data. I do not use Time Machine and i have Snow Leopard.

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  5. Lillian says:
    1/1/12 at 9:14 pm

    I have 10.6.8 on MacBook Pro. When I try to eject my 1TB external hard drive, I get the error message “one or more programs may be using it.” When I tried to eject it from Utilities, it said that “it could not be unmounted.” What’s the safest way to unmount it? Can I just shut down my laptop and then turn off the external hard drive after the computer is shut down?

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