unmount disk failed on older macbook pro

#Unmount disk failed on older macbook pro how to
#Unmount disk failed on older macbook pro mac os x
#Unmount disk failed on older macbook pro mac os

How to Forcibly Unmount a Disk by Command Line in Mac OSĪnother method uses the command line to force unmount a disk, but this is not the top recommended option because of potential for data loss.Ĭaution must be used with this approach however because forcibly unmounting a disk can cause data loss of the drive being forcibly unmounted. In that case, you’ll need to boot from a separate USB drive to fix the error.

Go to “First Aid” to verify and repair the disk, or go to “Erase” to format the diskĪgain, if the disk throwing the errors is the same as the primary boot partition that Recovery is also on, the above method may not work to resolve the problem.

Select “Disk Utility” from the boot menu.Reboot the Mac holding down the “Option” key and choose the Recovery partition.This will not work if the error was triggered by attempting to modify the boot disk through partitions or formatting, and you will need to use the method above with a boot disk instead.

#Unmount disk failed on older macbook pro mac os

If the Unable to Unmount Error is triggered by first aid or formatting a non-boot partition, you may be able to fix the error by booting from the Recovery partition that is included with all new versions of Mac OS X. How to Fix Disk Utility Errors via Mac Recovery Partition For older Macs running prior versions of Mac OS X, typically anything running OS X 10.6 or earlier will have a SuperDrive, and thus shipped with a bootable DVD that can serve this same purpose. Such boot drives are easy to create on your own, here are instructions for making boot disks for OS X 10.9, OS X 10.8, and OS X 10.7.

#Unmount disk failed on older macbook pro mac os x

This is a good example of why it’s very valuable to have a bootable USB thumb drive set up with whatever version of Mac OS X is running on your Macs, because without a separate boot drive some of these errors would be unresolvable. The above steps did the trick and everything was working again as expected. I ran into this twice recently, first when attempting to modify partitions on a drive, which came right along with a separate “ partition failed” error, and again was triggered when attempting to format those partitions. Now perform the original task that threw the “Couldn’t Unmount” error.Go to “First Aid” and verify the disk, then repair if needed.At the boot menu, choose “Disk Utility” (if using an Installer disk, pull down the “Utilities” menu to access Disk Utility).Hold down the OPTION key during boot, then select the attached boot drive (typically has an orange icon at the boot menu).Attach the USB boot drive to the Mac and reboot.You will need any Mac OS X boot drive to complete this task, I used a Mavericks boot installer drive for this purpose but others should work too, whether they are installation drives or just recovery drives, the important thing is they are bootable and separate from the primary boot disk that stores the installed OS: This is the recommended method because it should always fix the error. How to Resolve the Unmount Error with a USB Boot Drive We’ll also show you a way to forcibly unmount a disk by command line, though that approach must be used with caution as it can lead to data loss on the drive in question. We’ll cover both with a bit of explanation.

This will allow you to fix the problem, regardless of the cause, by one of two means, the first is a sure-thing to fix the issue, while the other only works sometimes. For the boot drive, it shouldn’t matter which version of Mac OS X it’s for (assuming 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, etc at least), the only requirement is that it has Disk Utility – which they all do.

For the former situation where the boot drive is being modified, the easiest solution is to boot from another drive and run Disk Utility from there instead. Typically the “Couldn’t Unmount Disk” error pops up when the currently boot drive is being modified, or if a disk was trying to be erased you may find the erase failed with a couldn’t unmount disk error.