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I was using an external hard drive and the icon has disappeared (the program used to mount the volume hung so I stopped the process with diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk3) - so now I do not know how to safely eject it. It's an old external hard disk, and I can feel it spinning when I put my hand on it, so I don't want to take any risks.

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    Does it show up in Disk Utility? If it does, eject it and if not, then it's safe to unplug.
    – user3439894
    Commented Mar 11, 2021 at 15:36
  • If you unmounted all the partitions, you can just unplug it. The potential for damage is when it's still mounted and being written to.
    – At0micMutex
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 1:36
  • @user3439894 please make that an answer. It has saved me several times over the past day. Including right now, when traditional right click -> Eject worked, yet the disk was still physically spinning (I could feel/hear it!). Doing as you suggested and opening Disk Utility, right clicking on the external volume in question and clicking 'Eject' there worked
    – stevec
    Commented Mar 13, 2021 at 13:43

1 Answer 1

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If a disk has been ejected via Finder and the icon has disappeared but you feel it hasn't yet, then here are some things you can try:

  • Does it show up in Disk Utility? If it does, eject it from there and if not, then it's safe to unplug.

  • In Terminal, diskutil list -- It the device is not listed then it's safe to unplug it. If it is listed use e.g. diskutil eject diskN where diskN is e.g. disk3, then follow it up with diskutil unmountDisk diskN. If it doesn't unmount you can use: diskutil unmountDisk force diskN

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