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Posted By: Ira L "Disk Not Ejected Properly" - 08/29/14 04:22 PM
Here's a head scratcher, at least for me.

An external Firewire hard drive (with its own power source and plugged into an uninterrupted power source, connected via the FW800 port) would occasionally disappear from the Desktop (seems to happen while the iMac was sleeping) and produce the improper ejection message. Power the drive off and then on and all was well, but it would infrequently happen again.

Now that drive is gone and there is a port-powered USB drive acting as the Time Machine backup, and it too occasionally does what the above drive did. Different type of port and power source, similar behavior.

The only setting I can see that might relate to this is the Energy Saver checkbox to put drives to sleep when possible. But that should not cause them to eject improperly, no?
Posted By: joemikeb Re: "Disk Not Ejected Properly" - 08/29/14 10:05 PM
Have you checked the log files to see if they yield any clues?
Posted By: jchuzi Re: "Disk Not Ejected Properly" - 08/29/14 11:28 PM
Do you have Checkmate? That will do it when it's going through its routines (at least in my experience). When that happens, my TM backup disappears when the computer wakes from scheduled sleep. It doesn't happen if I manually sleep the computer. After Checkmate has done its (weekly) thing, it doesn't happen until the next scheduled maintenance check.

You can always re-mount the drive via Disk Utility.
Posted By: Ira L Re: "Disk Not Ejected Properly" - 08/30/14 03:16 PM
No, Checkmate is not installed.

However, I did notice something interesting. Recall from another thread of mine that what's really going on is that the original internal HD on this particular iMac got a SMART failure iminient alert. So I created a new external USB startup drive from the Recovery partition. Apparently the Time Machine backup included some corrupt System components, so I could not restore from that. I used Migration Assistant to bring over non-System components. I also got a new external USB drive to serve as the Time Machine drive, and it is this drive that is spontaneously ejecting.

After perusing the logs, nothing significant showed up except that the old Time Machine drive had some issues with being indexed by Spotlight. I looked at what the new Time Machine drive was backing up and to my surprise, not only was the new external startup drive included (as it should be), but the old, failing internal and no longer the startup drive, was also being backed up. I removed this drive from the backups under the TM options. The also answers my unstated question as to why my new Time Machine drive had to be larger than the original one.

I'm not sure this will fix the premature ejection problem, but it is worth a try and I don't want the old drive in the backup process regardless.

I'll post back if the situation is resolved.

Feel free to comment in the meantime.
Posted By: Ira L Re: "Disk Not Ejected Properly" - 09/01/14 03:49 PM
Update: I thought it was cured. Two days, no improper ejections. But this morning it happened. Argh.

Now my next thought is that the external Time Machine drive is spinning down, going to sleep and somehow getting "lost". It is connected by a USB port. Shouldn't happen, but…

So I will use a nifty little piece of software ( Sleepless) to keep the drives awake but let the screen go dark.

More later…
Posted By: Ira L Re: "Disk Not Ejected Properly" - 09/08/14 03:40 PM
One week later:

With the computer in the Sleepless mode described above, there have been no improper disk ejects.

I can only guess that there is some issue with external drives and sleeping. Didn't seem to matter if the connection was Firewire or USB; the disk would get "lost" either way.
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