OSX: Can’t Unmount/Eject Volume
I ran into this issue today and thought I’d post the solution for the
community. I went to eject a volume that I had mounted and got the
message from the OS saying that the disk was in use. I could Force Eject
if I wanted to, but generally I don’t like to do that unless I know
what data could be mangled.
I opened Activity Monitor and didn’t see anything that looked promising as the culprit. I closed everything that I had been using on that volume, including Quitting any of the applications that were still open in my Dock.
That didn’t help. So what I really needed was to know the actual process that was hanging onto a file.
Here’s the unix command that did the trick for me:
Preview turned out to be the culprit. It wasn’t still in my Dock so must have had a problem shutting down. I closed it in Activity Monitor and the volume ejected normally.
This doesn’t happen nearly as often on a Mac as on a Windows machine and when it does there’s luckily an easy way to resolve the problem!
I opened Activity Monitor and didn’t see anything that looked promising as the culprit. I closed everything that I had been using on that volume, including Quitting any of the applications that were still open in my Dock.
That didn’t help. So what I really needed was to know the actual process that was hanging onto a file.
Here’s the unix command that did the trick for me:
lsof | grep VOLUMENAME
Preview turned out to be the culprit. It wasn’t still in my Dock so must have had a problem shutting down. I closed it in Activity Monitor and the volume ejected normally.
This doesn’t happen nearly as often on a Mac as on a Windows machine and when it does there’s luckily an easy way to resolve the problem!
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