{"id":48,"date":"2007-02-11T16:17:42","date_gmt":"2007-02-11T23:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/2007\/02\/11\/a-set-of-scripts-to-unmount-drives-before-sleeping\/"},"modified":"2026-05-03T21:02:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T04:02:51","slug":"a-set-of-scripts-to-unmount-drives-before-sleeping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/2007\/02\/11\/a-set-of-scripts-to-unmount-drives-before-sleeping\/","title":{"rendered":"A set of scripts to unmount drives before sleeping"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I’m at home, my MacBook Pro<\/a> is hooked up to an external display<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\r\ntell application \u201cFinder\u201d\u009d\r\n    eject (every disk whose ejectable is true)\r\nend tell\r\n<\/pre>\n
In most cases, this simple script works great, but it suffers from a few drawbacks:<\/p>\n
    \n
  1. It ejects not only hard drives, but optical discs as well, which is usually not what I want.<\/li>\n
  2. It won’t eject remotely mounted drives, such as NFS<\/a> or AFP<\/a> mounts.<\/li>\n
  3. It won’t work if Finder is not running, which may be the case for PathFinder<\/a> users like myself.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    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:<\/p>\n
    \r\n-- Set this list to the names of the local drives\r\n-- you want to unmount\r\nset local_drives to [\u201cBackup drive\u201d\u009d, \u201cClone\u201d\u009d]\r\n\r\nrepeat with drive in local_drives\r\n   \r\n   set drive to \u201c\/Volumes\/\u201d\u009d & drive\r\n   set driveExists to false\r\n   \r\n   try -- Ignore AppleScript warnings\r\n      do shell script \u201ctest -d \u201d\u009d & \u00ac\r\n            quoted form of drive\r\n      \r\n      -- Test completed successfully; drive exists\r\n      set driveExists to true\r\n   end try\r\n   \r\n   if driveExists then\r\n      -- Eject the drive\r\n      do shell script \"umount \" & \u00ac\r\n            quoted form of drive\r\n   end if\r\n   \r\nend repeat\r\n<\/pre>\n
    And here’s the part that unmounts the remote drives:<\/p>\n
    \r\n-- Set this list to the names of the remote drives\r\n-- you want to unmount\r\nset remote_drives to [\u201cDreamHost\u201d\u009d, \u201cDOC\u201d\u009d]\r\n\r\nrepeat with drive in remote_drives\r\n   \r\n   set drive to \u201c\/Volumes\/\u201d\u009d & drive\r\n   do shell script \u201cumount \u201d\u009d & \u00ac\r\n         quoted form of drive\r\n   \r\nend repeat\r\n<\/pre>\n
    I don’t eject optical drives, but if for some reason you need to do so, here’s how:<\/p>\n
    \r\n-- This will eject the optical disc in the\r\n-- primary (built-in) drive\r\ndo shell script \u201cdrutil -drive 1 eject\u201d\u009d\r\n\r\n-- This will eject all discs in all optical drives\r\ndo shell script \u201cdrutil eject\u201d\u009d\r\n<\/pre>\n
    For a downloadable version of these scripts, see my AppleScript page<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac","category-software","category-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":901,"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}