When I’m at home, my MacBook Pro is hooked up to an external display, a couple of hard drives, and other peripherals. When I need to go on the road, I put it to sleep, unplug all the peripherals, and away I go.
There’s only one problem: Unplugging a hard drive can corrupt its filesystem if it’s still mounted. To prevent that from happening, I wrote a script that automatically unmounts all drives. As an added bonus, the script fails if any of those drives are busy and can’t be unmounted, warning me to take additional action before hitting the road. Here it is:
tell application “Finderâ€
eject (every disk whose ejectable is true)
end tell
In most cases, this simple script works great, but it suffers from a few drawbacks:
- It ejects not only hard drives, but optical discs as well, which is usually not what I want.
- It won’t eject remotely mounted drives, such as NFS or AFP mounts.
- It won’t work if Finder is not running, which may be the case for PathFinder users like myself.
To fix these issues, I split the script into two parts, one for local drives and one for remote drives, and I rewrote it so that optical discs would be left alone. Here’s the part that unmounts local drives:
-- Set this list to the names of the local drives
-- you want to unmount
set local_drives to [“Backup driveâ€, “Cloneâ€]
repeat with drive in local_drives
set drive to “/Volumes/†& drive
set driveExists to false
try -- Ignore AppleScript warnings
do shell script “test -d †& ¬
quoted form of drive
-- Test completed successfully; drive exists
set driveExists to true
end try
if driveExists then
-- Eject the drive
do shell script "umount " & ¬
quoted form of drive
end if
end repeat
And here’s the part that unmounts the remote drives:
-- Set this list to the names of the remote drives
-- you want to unmount
set remote_drives to [“DreamHostâ€, “DOCâ€]
repeat with drive in remote_drives
set drive to “/Volumes/†& drive
do shell script “umount †& ¬
quoted form of drive
end repeat
I don’t eject optical drives, but if for some reason you need to do so, here’s how:
-- This will eject the optical disc in the -- primary (built-in) drive do shell script “drutil -drive 1 eject†-- This will eject all discs in all optical drives do shell script “drutil ejectâ€
For a downloadable version of these scripts, see my AppleScript page.
How do you make this run as a default when you put the computer to sleep?
I have a script called “Sleep” that runs these unmount drive scripts, along with other housekeeping tasks, then tells the computer to sleep. I simply run it manually. If you’re looking for an automated solution, try SleepWatcher.
I am looking for a good way to sleep my laptop and unmount a few drives. The issue I am coming up with is a Sleep script. Can you please send me a copy of yours.
TIA
P.S. Sleepwatcher is not what I am looking for 😉
The following script will put the computer to sleep:
tell application “Finder” to sleep
[…] Trevor’s Bike Shed » Blog Archive » A set of scripts to unmount drives before sleeping There’s only one problem: Unplugging a hard drive can corrupt its filesystem if it’s still mounted. To prevent that from happening, I wrote a script that automatically unmounts all drives. As an added bonus, the script fails if any of those drives are busy and can’t be unmounted, warning me to take additional action before hitting the road. […]
With the simple script you initially mentioned, the third drawback can be overcome by changing the middle line to:
eject (every disk whose ejectable is true or local volume is false)
Any way that I can apply this to my DSDT? I’m running an EFI patched verion of Snow Leo on a non mac (for experimentation) and this is the only issue I haven’t found a fix for yet – which doesn’t make alterations to the native system install..
The script for ejecting local drives was giving me
Operation not permittederrors.What helped was using
diskutil unmountinstead ofumountNice info and a great starting point. I’d like to give a little something back now that my problem is solved. I found that the above technique would not quite work for me as it falls short with USB flash drives. Use of an applescript calling Finder to unmount a flash drive destroys all traces of it such that calling diskutil to remount it after wakeup fails. Using the following 2 commands below will successfully unmount and then remount any and all connected USB drives AND leave your integrated optical drive alone …
unmount:
ls /dev/disk* | grep ‘disk[1-9]s[1-9]’ | xargs -I{} /usr/sbin/diskutil umount {}
remount:
ls /dev/disk* | grep ‘disk[1-9]s[1-9]’ | xargs -I{} /usr/sbin/diskutil mount {}
Aloha !
Thanks Steve B
does this also work on mounted network shares as well?
Im looking for a solution to unmount all external media and drives except optical
Thanks
@Steve…I’m sure you can get something to work for mounted drives, however you mount them you can unmount.
@All, why use umount or unmount. Seems using eject with diskutil is much safer for letting unwritten files to be saved. (Based on the man pages and is what I am planning to use.