could not unmount disk when formatting usb mac

#COULD NOT UNMOUNT DISK WHEN FORMATTING USB MAC HOW TO#
#COULD NOT UNMOUNT DISK WHEN FORMATTING USB MAC MAC OS X#
#COULD NOT UNMOUNT DISK WHEN FORMATTING USB MAC INSTALL#
#COULD NOT UNMOUNT DISK WHEN FORMATTING USB MAC PC#

Using that, right click the disk icon and in the Info window look at Sharing & Permissions at the bottom. For this you will have to have an Administrator account. Another method is to correct the privileges for that disk (not the permissions for the whole computer which can take forever). Restarting often overcomes MacOS glitches, which is what this is. The first thing to do is a restart (after saving what you have been working on to somewhere you can – e.g., the desktop). Even if you have backed it all up and can restore it, it’s still a pain.

#COULD NOT UNMOUNT DISK WHEN FORMATTING USB MAC HOW TO#

This is obviously a problem with the operating system that, as so often, Apple refuses to acknowledge, let alone fix.Īs for how to solve it, reformatting a disk that contains your stuff is not a good idea since it would have to be erased first, and bang goes your stuff. Sometimes it happens to other external HDDs at the same time.

#COULD NOT UNMOUNT DISK WHEN FORMATTING USB MAC PC#

It does not only affect new drives that have been preformated for a PC but those already formatted for the Mac that have not previously had the problem and even the few that come preformatted for the Mac. The problem of external drives on the Mac becoming read only goes on and on.

#COULD NOT UNMOUNT DISK WHEN FORMATTING USB MAC INSTALL#

If you’re dying to have NTFS support, btw, it appears that the only solution i to install some third-party software, specifically either MacFUSE or NTFS-3g. That’s solved the problem, and I am off on my merry backup journey. Now, finally, one more peek at the newly renamed drive with “Get Info…”: I don’t want to use it – I already have a disk drive specifically for Time Machine – so I click on “Don’t Use”. What you might see, however, is a prompt asking if you want to use the drive with Time Machine if you’re running the slick Apple backup software: Once it’s done you’re also done and good to go. The resultant action will take a few seconds up to a few minutes or longer, depending on your drive size and speed…

Give the drive a name - I chose “Insurance” for mine - and click on “Erase…”Īyup, there’s nothing on the disk, so let’s proceed. If you wanted to have it be PC compatible, use MS-DOS format, but be warned that my experience is that read/write speed suffers on the Mac because of it having to reorganize data as it hits the drive. Since I know that I’ll never plug this drive into a PC, I’ll choose a Mac disk format, and of those, extended journaled is your best bet. Now you can pick which format should be used when the disk is rebuilt from the list: You’ll want to click on the “Erase” option along the top after you’ve picked the drive. Click on your new drive on the list to proceed: Start it up and you’ll see all the drives listed on the left side.

The program you want to accomplish this is in the Applications folder, within Utilities: Disk Utility. To fix it, the path I took was to let the Mac erase and reformat the drive, figuring that since it was empty, there’d be nothing lost and I would be confident that it was then completely compatible with my Mac systems. Dead useless as a backup device, for sure! That’s the Mac’s subtle way of saying that you can’t write to it.Ĭhose File –> Get Info… to get more details:Īgain, you can see on the bottom that it says I can only read the drive contents, not write to it. Notice the lower left corner? I’ve highlighted it: the pencil icon with the line through it. So here’s what I saw when I looked at the drive on the Mac, within the Finder: I will say that initially I too was befuddled and closely examined the hard drive itself to see if it had a “read only” switch.

I had a similar experience myself when I hooked up my new 2TB external drive to my Mac Mini server, so I can show you how I fixed the problem. In particular, it doesn’t natively support computer drives that are formatted as NTFS, the Windows NT File System, a very efficient file system designed for Windows computers that supports extremely large file sizes.

#COULD NOT UNMOUNT DISK WHEN FORMATTING USB MAC MAC OS X#

While the majority of the time you should be able to just plug in any sort of external hard disk or drive, sometimes Mac OS X does get a bit picky about write permissions based on how the drive is initially formatted.

Could not unmount disk when formatting usb mac