WhyNotUnmount is a small project which I have started to make life a little bit easier for all those people carrying external hard drives with their MacBook. Of course, it is suitable for all other kinds of Macs also. WhyNotUnmount attempts to tell you why a certain (external) hard drive, DMG or other volume cannot be unmounted. In most cases this is because a file on that disk remains opened by an application on your Mac. WhyNotUnmount tells you which Application prevents your volume from being unmounted properly.
The application is currently in alpha (prerelease) state, which means that there may still be a number of bugs and – more importantly – that it may not always detect the correct reason for why unmounting is not possible. I am working on these issues at the moment. However, WhyNotUmmount is freeware, so it may take a little while until it is completely stable. In the meantime enjoy the early version!
Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard).
Details on the artefacts page / Direct download.
4 responses so far ↓
1 parag Nov 20, 2008 at 5:47 pm
i have always wanted this feature and i always wondered why the OS never took care of such an obviously useful feature. “the disk cannot be ejected” WELL WHY NOT!?
2 WhyNotUnmount 0.2 (Alpha Prerelease) Nov 21, 2008 at 12:11 pm
[…] WhyNotUnmount 0.2 has been released today. A number of bugs are fixed now. WhyNotUnmount will now display all blocking processes regardless of whether they are UI or system processes. For a short descript of what the program does, please see the original post on WhyNotUnmount. […]
3 Paul Mison Nov 26, 2008 at 7:04 pm
paraq: in fact, Mac OS (no X) did warn you what was stopping a disk from being ejected. I’m still amazed that, ten years into the Mac OS X development era, it’s not a system-level function, but at least the presence of a third-party app might help people realise it’s possible, and necessary.
4 WhyNotUnmount 0.3 Beta Dec 18, 2008 at 8:03 pm
[…] For more information on what the program does, please see the original post on WhyNotUnmount. […]
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