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I want to eject an external 1 TB FAT32 disk on macOS 13.1, but when pressing the eject icon it says:

The disk MYDISK wasn't ejected because one or more programs may be using it

Is it OK to do "Force eject", or might I risk that fsck_msdos will run again? (It just did run, took a very long time after I just tried to clean the Trash. Nothing else).

Running:

sudo lsof /Volumes/MYDISK

does not return anything.

So what is going on? Why is macOS lying to me? And how can I really remove/eject that disk safely?

jaume
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Alex
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    I had situations in the past where lsof /Volumes/mount didn't return anything but lsof | grep /Volumes/mount did. – nohillside Dec 16 '22 at 08:52
  • Oh F#####CK. A billion of these shit useless nonsense mds processes!!! Kill one of them, there will be two more. How can I solve that? Is there ANY way to stop all these stupid mds processes?? – Alex Dec 16 '22 at 08:53
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    Ah found a solution from https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/142459/how-to-eject-my-external-drive-when-my-mac-refuses-because-of-spotlight/142666: sudo killall mds. Now I need to figure out how to remove the trash on that drive ... – Alex Dec 16 '22 at 08:58
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    This happens to me from time to time and when it does and I have no more apps that are doing anything on the drive nor are any copy operations in place. I use the more pragmatic rule that says if I'm not using the drive it is not in use and force eject it. Never had a problem doing that. – Steve Chambers Dec 16 '22 at 17:59
  • Did you try force-quit Finder? Or just do a hard restart. – Jon Dec 17 '22 at 19:06
  • Finder isn't in charge of the process, only the notifier, & hard rebooting is going to interrupt potentially important processes. – Tetsujin Dec 17 '22 at 19:10
  • You say: "Is there ANY way to stop all these stupid mds processes?" Try telling Time Machine to not index that file system. "System Preferences >> Time Machine >> Options >> Exclude these items from Backups" I think will get you there. (details different with each release) – aMike Dec 18 '22 at 16:12

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