Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
@AlejandrodelRío Awesome, glad it helped! On a related question/answer (apple.stackexchange.com/questions/268998/…) I made the note that if you do let fsck run its course (might take a few hours) it should complete and allow read/writes again.
@JaseWhatson yep. what I've found is that you have to let fsck finish successfully (it can take a long time, depending on disk size) before you can stop having to kill it every time.
I was having the exact same issue where unmountDisk would work fine but eject would result in the "timed out" message. I finally found a suggestion to see if fsck was holding the disk hostage. A quick ps aux | grep fsck revealed that indeed it was hijacking the disk/volume as soon as it was plugged in. sudo pkill -f fsck (or just kill with the PID if you prefer) immediately allowed the volume to be mounted.
fsck is what did it! it was preventing my machine from ejecting the disk and from mounting the volume. sudo pkill -f fsck was enough to kill mac "trying to fix" the volume and let it show up as needed.