Finder does not eject dmg or other mounted drives

Question

Level 1

8 points

Finder does not eject dmg or other mounted drives

Since the only issues I found were about 15 years old in the forum (back then under Lion), I'll ask it again:

I'm on a MacBook Air 2013 with Mojave and since recently cannot eject mounted DMGs, network or hardware drives via Finder. I need to open the Disk Utility in order to un-mount them.

This did NOT help:

-force-quitting and restarting Finder

-deleting Finder, Dashboard plists in Library

-force-quitting the Quicklook process via Activity Monitor

Note: I also tried deleting the above files by rebooting in Safe Mode. Didn't change anything.

This issue is new, i. e. not since installation of Mojave. But I don't know if and what I might have done or installed or so to have caused it.

Under a second user account, ejecting works as it should via Finder.

What could be the problem?

MacBook Air

Posted on Aug 30, 2022 3:08 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

iBonck Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 2, 2022 4:31 PM in response to iBonck

Dear Forum,

I have solved the problem. And I'm ashamed as to how stupid I am.

The reason why I could not eject from Finder was, because I apparently put a checkmark in Tinker Tool where I shouldn't have:

This is one of the first things I do after freshly installing a macOS, take Tinker Tool, Onyx and so forth to tweak the system to my likings. Since this is a MacBook Air and it doesn't have a DVD drive, I must have thought, let's hide the eject function.

Duh! This also eliminates the possibility to eject everything else, like DMG's, servers and so on.

So, it's all good now. Thank you and good night.

Reply

Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

245,483 points

Aug 30, 2022 3:35 PM in response to iBonck

We need to see what all is running, a report from this will not display any personal info...

EtreCheck is a FREE simple little diagnostic tool to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac. It will not display any personal info.

https://www.etrecheck.com/

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report if you capture the URL while there…

https://pastebin.com/

Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck. In a Reply before you click post, look for this to add longer texts...

Reply

Answer 3

HWTech

Level 9

60,650 points

Sep 1, 2022 6:44 PM in response to iBonck

You can try using the following Terminal command to see what process or app is accessing an item within the mounted volume. Many times it will be Spotlight, but I've also seen Finder and other apps not liking to give up control either.

sudo  fs_usage  <path-to-mountpoint>

Replace "<path-to-mountpoint>" with the actual mount point for the volume. Best to use the Finder to drag & drop the folder onto the open Terminal window after first typing "sudo fs_usage " so the path is filled in automatically which is especially important if the path or volume contains any spaces. You will be prompted for your admin password. Nothing will appear on the screen as you type the password so press the "Return" key to submit the password. To terminate the command press Control + C.

For example the command will look something like this for the volume "MyDrive":

sudo  fs_usage  /Volumes/MyDrive

or for the volume "My Drive" (notice the space in the volume name and the "\ " where the backslash is used so the space is properly registered as part of a single name):