Always eject external discs before unplugging them from your Mac
Quick Mac Tip, 14 November 2010
You may sometimes plug in some kind of disc to your Mac. It could be a thumb drive, an external hard drive, or perhaps a reader for your digital camera’s memory card.
Seeing a friend recently just unplug a drive sparked this quick tip.
Always eject an external drive
Eject a disc properly to avoid corrupt files.
There’s a simple rule about such devices: always eject them before you unplug.
Why?
The computer needs to do some filing and housekeeping on every drive. If you unplug without warning that housekeeping can be missed or go wrong and your files may be corrupted or damaged.
How to eject a drive
When you do one of the following actions the computer carries out its housekeeping, but it doesn’t ‘spit out’ a hard drive in the way it does a CD or DVD. Wait a few moments before unplugging the drive from the computer.
If the device has a display light it will flash a few times and then shine steadily. Wait until the light is steady before unplugging.
Eject a disc by clicking the Eject symbol (obscured below the yellow Tooltip).
- Select the drive in the Sidebar of a Finder window and choose
Ejectfrom the File menu. - Select the drive in the Sidebar of a Finder window and click the
Ejectsymbol (⏏) beside the name of the drive. - Select the drive on the Desktop and drag it to the Trash. As you start to drag the Trash can icon will change to an
Ejectsymbol (⏏). - Select the drive on the Desktop. Right click or Control (⌃) click on it and choose
Ejectfrom the pop-up menu.
Advanced users: use an Applescript like the following, replacing Elements with the name of your drive.
tell application "Finder" activate eject "Elements" end tell
Do you have any stories about ejecting drives (or failing to)? Tell us in the Comments.
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Being the friend who foolishly pulled the hard drive plug out of the computer before “ejecting”- I would like to say in my defence – there was no warning that this was bad for the computer or hard drive.
I wish the makers would put a little star over the icon to warn you – or somehow prevent you from taking it out without appropriate action. …..
finally, one foolproof way of keeping my mac and hard drive safe is to continue to let miraz manage anything but the basics.
thanks Miraz
Free menu bar app ejector allows you to eject any disk via a pull down menu that is always visible – highly recommended. Also, of all the times I have accidentally done this I can’t recall one instance of file corruption…
I’ve unplugged without ejecting quite a few times. In every case it’s because I was distracted and forgot. I’m not aware of any problems from it, though one of my external drives is behaving oddly. I need to reformat it once I’m sure I’ve retrieved all the data from it.
Hello there,
Since my upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard I need to select each partition if I want to eject a HD that has several volumes. I would LOVE to get the old way back, like in Tiger. Ejecting one partition threw out the others as well. Is there a script or so? I don’t want to have to press a button while hitting eject. Just the old fashioned easy way again. Pleeease?
Hi there, I have just recently entered the “Mac” family and as a newbie, need some help! I am learning more and more about Mac and OS X every day (although I still feel I have many more mountains to climb!!) but think that I might be missing something simple with this one. I have a 1Gb flash drive that keeps ejecting itself from my macbook pro (never a problem on my PC). So I done some research and people say that I should format it to FAT32, so I did this and I am still having the same problems. My Mac just wont let me copy anything into the flash drive – even though its clean and freshly formatted to FAT32. Is there a setting on my mac I am not selecting?? Any help would be much appreciated.. (And sorry if this isn’t the place to ask).
Many thanks,
Nathan
Nathan. Try one of the Mac OS Extended formatting options (the first on the list is the best bet) and see if that solves it. I think (but am not sure) that FAT is more a Windows thing.
If Extended doesn’t solve the problem then maybe the thumb drive is just faulty. Try another one.
I was using my external hard drive earlier and was looking for older files, then suddenly the “disk was not ejected properly”….. popped up and the hard drive was instantly removed from the device in finder. Because of that the eject button was nowhere to be found.
So how can i eject my hard drive w/o damaging my old files? do i just turn off the laptop first then i eject the hard drive?? please help me…
By the time the system gives that ‘not ejected properly’ message you may as well just unplug the external drive.
This has happened to me occasionally. I think it’s caused by the connecting cable not being properly seated. It jiggles a bit and the connection breaks. Or the cable itself may be faulty.
Make sure you have good backups of whatever’s on the external disc.
my mac book will just not eject my flash drive and my mp3 player ( sansa fuze plus ). it keeps saying after trying too eject it, ” unable too eject disk, try quitting applications and try again. i then quit all apllications and it still says the same thing ( HELP THIS IS DRIVING ME NUTS !!!!!!!!! )
Does this happen all the time, or just this once? If it’s just this once then log out or shut down and pull out the flash drive before you restart.
If it’s all the time then check to see if Spotlight’s trying to index it and add it to SPotlight’s ‘don’t index’ list. See if that helps.
Cheers,
Miraz
So I unplugged my external hard drive from my MacBook Pro last night. Now the Mac cannot read it (message = “disk not formatted”). Worse yet, my PC cannot read it either. Question? The messages of each laptop ask if I want the machine to reformat it? Is there any danger to doing that? I have all of my iTunes music stored on my Seagate 100GB External HD. Please help, anyone.
Sal, if you reformat your drive it will WIPE all data. You will lose all your iTunes library.
I’d suggest first trying some things like using different cables, plugging it in to different ports, restart your computer and try again.
If none of those easy and free things do you any good then you need to seek professional help.
You may need to pay someone to try to recover your iTunes library from the disc.
Then I suggest you buy 2 new discs and copy your iTunes Library onto both.
Unplugging external drive without ejecting it first:
I did this on two occasions and each time the G-4 refused to go to sleep from then on. I had to re-install the operating system to get “sleep” back. After this happened twice I decided to test my theory. After making a “SuperDuper” back up I intentionally unplugged an external HD. Sure enough, it lost “sleep” again.
I’ll never do that again although I no longer use the G-4.
Hi,
I always drag my hard drive to the eject button before unplugging it, but maybe it didn’t recognize it fast enough because I got the warning message pictured above. Now, every time I plug it in it just clicks at me and won’t even show up on my computer! Or if it does, it quickly tells me off and goes away and starts the clicking noise again — which only stops if I unplug it!
It is a new hard drive so I don’t even have anything crazy important on it so if I absolutely HAVE to I’ll delete everything on it and re back-up my entire computer, I just want my hard drive to work again! Any suggestions? Thank you!
Clicking noise? Coming from the drive itself, if so the drive is probably bad.
My USB works perfectly fine, the above mentioned error occurs only when i tried connecting the usb to ubuntu (vmware fusion) visual machine. Any solution for this?
The sidebar in the Finder Window does not list Magic Jack which is plugged into the USB port,
so how can I safely eject the Magic Jack?
I’m not familiar with the device I’m afraid, but a quick Google search showed plenty of results discussing it and how to remove it.
Having just received my first Macbook Pro for christmas, I am a complete newbie to the Mac/Apple world. I have an iPhone and iPod, but have not used a computer from Apple for years.
The other day I accidently jiggled my flashdrive out of the usb port and my Mac laptop stated it was done incorrectly and desingated a few files as now corrupt, just as stated above. Here’s the problem, I run a transcription business and all of my work is located on the flashdrive. If I do not have access to the templates or reports, it is problematic. Is there a way of preventing this from happening should the flashdrive accidently be jiggled out again? Or at least ensure that I can locate the files should they become corrupt and disappear…
I have never had a problem with my PC (my little girl pulls the flashdrive out all of the time). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Hi ksp,
good question. I have also sometimes accidentally jiggled a USB device and had a warning that files *may* be corrupted.
Quite honestly though, if this is your income-generating work and you’re relying on those files then keeping them on a thumb drive is quite a risk.
I would really urge you to take a look at the free Dropbox service. It allows you to easily share files (privately) with yourself and provides a handy way of making sure a file you’re currently working on resides in more than one place.
I use Dropbox myself and have done for several years. I would not be without it.
For more info see: http://mactips.info/2009/03/share-files-easily-with-dropbox
If you use a PC at work and a Mac at home Dropbox is an ideal way to always have access to your files.
Cheers,
Miraz
My hard drive that I was using for Time Machine was unplugged by accident. The “disc not ejected properly” window popped up but it was obviously too late. Now when I plug the drive in nothing shows up. I tried re-starting with the drive plugged in and without it plugged in (and plugged it in after start-up) and it never shows up. Any thoughts or is this just fried!
I had shutdown my computer without ejecting my hard drive. The next time I turned on my computer, I got the error message. Now, when I plug in the hard drive, I get that message and the icon disappears from my desktop before I can try to repair it. What is going on with that?
Hi, My external hard drive does not appear in the side bar of the finder window and i have no clue how to eject it or find the hard drive, also i was having problems with the hard drive saying that i did not have access to change anything on the hard drive….any help???
If I pulled the external hard drive out before ejecting it and my everything on my external hard drive was deleted is there a way I can get that info back?
Hello, could someone please help or explain this problem,
Less than a week ago I purchased a SanDisk Cruzer Switch 16gb Pen Drive, first plug into my imac and load a few files (no more than 2gb worth) onto it (works fine). The next day I re-plug the drive back into the imac and get the message …
“Because a USB device was drawing too much power from your computer, one or more of your USB devices have been disabled”
I have tried plugging the drive into each of my imacs ports and always receive this message. Can’t access the drive at all. Is the pen drive now useless?
My keyboard works fine through the usb and so does my printer.
Thanks Josef
If your iMac is still under warranty, or you have Applecare then I suggest you contact Apple to query this. It sounds as though it could be a hardware problem.
The icon for my card reader does not show in finder therefore I can not eject properly. How can I get the icon to show.
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