Can't eject USB drive after Sequoia upgra…

Can't eject USB drive after Sequoia upgrade

I've got a USB bus in the USB port on my Mini. I plug in an external drive for BUs. I also plug in a thumb drive for BUs. It all used to work. I upgraded to Sequoia a few days ago. Now the drives won't eject because something is using them. Tried logging out, powering down, etc. Nothing works except force eject. Has Apple got a bug?

Mac mini, macOS 15.1

Posted on Nov 23, 2024 12:17 PM

Posted on Nov 24, 2024 7:14 AM

It's not just you! I'm running Sequoia 15.1.1 on a MacBook Air M3 15" and ALL external USB drives fail to eject and therefore require Force Eject:

USB-C drives
USB-A drives plugged in using Apple's $25 USB-A to USB-C adapter dongle
All drives formatted APFS

FSCK is not running. I've killed the Spotlight indexer but that hasn't helped.

Sometimes restarting the Mac will allow me to eject the drive in the first moments after restarting, so clearly something is kicking in early in the boot process which is preventing the drive from being ejected safely.

This is a new Mac purchased within the last few weeks and set up from scratch - that is, I didn't restore from a backup of any sort.

Every autumn brings a new version of MacOS and every autumn weird bugs such as this crop up. Clearly Apple's attention is focused elsewhere. It worries me that such basic things are being broken every year. After 40 years of MacOS, you'd think such basic features/functions would be protected from being broken by ongoing OS development: Apple excels in so many ways, yet the fact they can't protect their own OS from this sort of bugginess is more than a little worrying.

I've used the FeedBack Assistant to submit a bug report. Perhaps you can too. It won't be fixed if we keep it quiet: the squeaky hinge gets the oil! You can find official bug reporting details here.

All the best!

Peter

View in context