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My Mac has an external disk attached, and I often get "disk not ejected properly" warnings after resuming the computer from sleep. These warnings appear only when the disk has spun down during the sleep, and it seems that they are related to how long OS X is willing to wait for a device to become present before declaring it disconnected after resuming from sleep.

It would be nice to not get the annoying pop-up upon resuming from sleep, and the messages about journal replay in kernel.log look slightly alarming, even though it is unlikely that anything wouldn't have gotten written to disk while the computer was idle before going to sleep. Can this wait time be increased somehow?

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How is this disk connected to your mac? Via an active hub? If it's not connected directly into your Mac, do this once and report back. – gentmatt Dec 22 '11 at 9:24
@Matt, I don't know about the OP, but mine (I put the bounty on) is connected directly to my Mac. – Daniel Lawson♦ Dec 22 '11 at 14:42
In a German forum one person mentioned that the program PleaseSleep solved his problem. – gentmatt Dec 22 '11 at 15:23
In my case it's connected through a hub. I doubt that makes a difference. – Tuure Laurinolli Dec 26 '11 at 1:05

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote
+50

There are various google results for ejecting volumes on sleep, which should solve this problem.

First, write yourself a shell script to eject the volume. You could avoid setuid bits by using apple script.

#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application "Finder" to eject (disks where name = "VOLUME")

Next, install the SleepWatcher tool and configure ~/.sleep or /etc/rc.sleep appropriately.

There are similar directions for remounting the disk on wake in that Mac OS X Hints entry, but maybe you don't need that.

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What's the benefit of AppleScript instead of using hdiutil unmount /Volumes/VOLUME? – patrix♦ Dec 21 '11 at 18:24
None afaik, umount itself usually requires root, but maybe hdiutil handles that. – Jeff Burdges Dec 21 '11 at 19:15
This looks promising. I'd love to find a solution that just changes the time the OS will wait for the drive to wake up without unmounting the drives on sleep, but this is the best line of action I've seen so far. – Daniel Lawson♦ Dec 21 '11 at 19:26
1  
If you click though to the macosxhints.com, it discusses remounting the drive on wake, which works unless the drive in encrypted. – Jeff Burdges Dec 21 '11 at 19:48
If you have macports, you can install sleepwatcher with sudo port install sleepwatcher apparently – Jeff Burdges Dec 24 '11 at 16:27
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up vote 0 down vote

You can try autoeject or jettyson. They should both serve your purpose.

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They might help the OP. I'm running 10.5, and they both require 10.6.8, so they don't help me. They do look like good programs, though. – Daniel Lawson♦ Dec 21 '11 at 19:24
up vote -1 down vote

Have you tried this:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true

This should stop the disk demounting when you log out, whether or not it also works for sleep I don't know (and cannot test right now).

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Doesn't seem to help :-( – Daniel Lawson♦ Dec 21 '11 at 19:24
1  
Note that the problem is not that disks are unmounted when the computer goes to sleep, rather when it wakes up and the disk is slow to spin up. – Tuure Laurinolli Dec 26 '11 at 1:07

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