could not unmount disk external hard drive time machine

I hope you never have the issue I encountered. I then completely erased the original HDD and now use it strictly for Time Machine backups. That allowed me to transfer my data to my new drive (Yeah! Disaster averted). Of course, remember to replace “/dev/disk5” in the above commands with the drive you’re having issues with.Īfter performing those steps I was able to reconnect the drive and mount the partitions. If that happens step back and be sure to run that command.Ĥ.

If you don’t run the above “sudo pkill -f fsck” command you will likely get a message that the volume timed out. This successfully unmounted the entire drive. In any event, I had to kill that process to successfully perform the next step. It was likely initiated by me while using Disk Utility in my troubleshooting process. The fsck process on Mac is for review and repair a drive. You’ll need to enter your password but this will kill the process using the drive. Because some services were attempting to use the drive I could not unmount it. This provides a list of all drives connected that the OS recognizes. Then I followed these steps while awaiting delivery (thank goodness for Amazon Prime): Solutionįirst of all I ordered a new SSD to use for my media sharing (e.g. While I was certain I would need to reformat the entire drive I desperately wanted to get data off of the drive (for example my entire iTunes library that is 10+ years old!!!). I tried to mount both of them but it did not work. As it turns it out it did! The drive itself is recognized but the two partitions, while in the list, are greyed out. I decided to check if the Disk Utility recognized it. But my iMac doesn’t seem to recognize it.

Once I closed the aforementioned message about the disk not being properly ejected I turned off my external drive, disconnected it, turned it on, and connected it again to the computer. I thought I’d share the issue and the solution as I could not find anything online that solved this problem. You know the message … “Disk Not Ejected Properly.” At this point I could mount the HDD. One day, “out of the blue” as we say, it disconnected from my iMac (27-inch, Late 2012 running macOS Mojave Version 10.14.6). I recently had an issue with an expensive external hard drive which I use for Time Machine backups with a separate partition to share media on my home network.

Could not unmount disk external hard drive time machine