A set of scripts to unmount drives before sleeping
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 “Finder”
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 drive”, “Clone”]
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 [“DreamHost”, “DOC”]
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 eject”
For a downloadable version of these scripts, see my AppleScript page.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:35 am
How do you make this run as a default when you put the computer to sleep?
November 13th, 2007 at 11:15 am
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.
June 7th, 2008 at 6:30 am
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
June 7th, 2008 at 8:34 am
The following script will put the computer to sleep:
tell application “Finder” to sleep