OS 10.8 - Strange issue with external drive connected via Firewire 800 to my Mac Pro

Hi everyone,

I have a Early 2008 Mac Pro running OS 10.8. The machine is running perfectly except for one issue that appeared after moving to OS 10.8. The one external drive I use with this machine - a 320 gig drive in an OWC Enclosure and an Incessa swappable drive bay refuses to unmount. This drive is an old sueprduper clone of my OS 10.6 configuration, which I performed prior to moving to OS 10.7 last year. The drive is connected to the tower via Firewire 800.

Upon ejecting (aka unmounting) the drive so I can turn it off safely, the tower gives me a “Drive is being used by an application” error of sorts and offers me the option to force unmounting. I can’t remember the exact wording but it’s along those lines. A second and third try produced the same error. Since it’s a backup of my old 10.6 configuration, rather than risk damaging the drive and/or the data on it, I shutdown the computer and then turn off the external.

This never happened under OS 10.6 or 10.7. The issue appeared only after moving to Mountain Lion. I haven’t tried this drive under Firewire 400 or USB 2.0 yet nor have I moved it to a different computer. I’ll do that this evening to see if I can replicate the problem. In the meantime, just wondering if anyone else is experiencing a similar problem?

Thanks,

Robert

do you have another machine you can plug the drive in to?

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It might be spotlight trying to index those drives that's marking them in-use.

I've seen that message in ML, but for me, if you don't click either choice and just wait longer, after a while it will put up another message saying that it was successfully ejected.

Did you try unmounting with Disk Utility as well?

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MR/F Guestmap: [www.mapservices.org]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the suggestions! I bet it's Spotlight. But, I'll move the drive to another machine to see if it happens on it as well. That and try Disk Utility.

Robert

Somewhere along the way your current OS started using something on that drive.
I always keep any external with a working OS on it off except during backup out of fear of the same thing happening. I doubt the same thing will occur connected to a different mac. Maybe zip the entire 10.6 install?

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MR/F Guestmap: [www.mapservices.org]

Black,

That's the thing. The drive has been kept off since I did the initial clone and neither the tower nor the drive exhibited this behavior prior to the upgrade to mountain lion. The only reason I powered it up is because I forgot to label the drive at the time and forgot what was on the it - lol! That's how long it has been since I used it.

Don't worry - I have other, current backups of the tower. It actually has three internal drives. 2 qty 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blacks and a 2 TB Drive (make and model forgotten at the moment). 1 WD drive is my primary. The second WD is super duper clone of my current primary drive. The third drive is a Time Machine backup. That's on top of the Crashplan backup to the mini I use as a server.

Robert