Device Removal Warning Message At Random Times

ian27

It all started at 3......
Hello all,

I have a strange problem. At random times I am getting a "device removal" warning message even though I have not removed anything. I go to disk utility and I can not see anything that has been unmounted. Very strange.

Does anybody know why this may be happening? It has only started happening over the few couple of days. I had to wipe my internal drive as it was damaged, erase everything and install it all again.

In energy saver I have unchecked "put hard drives to sleep when possible". I also have 3 USB external drives attached to the machine.

Thank you in advance for any advice...

Ian
 
I have managed to narrow this down to my external USB drive. Everytime I try to use time machine to back things up it fails about a few minutes as the "device has been removed" message pops up again and again. The thing that I do not understand is, why when I go into disk utility has it not been unmounted?
 
How are your external USB drives connected?
Are all the drives directly connected to your Mac - or are you using an external USB hub?
Is that external drive used for the time machine (TM) backup? Or, is it one that you are trying to backup to another drive?
If that's your TM drive, then you should avoid using that one, as it's not too reliable!

Have you tried a different USB cable?

Have you tried changing the order of connections (swapping the connections among the various USB ports that you might have available) to get a more consistent connection?
 
Hey thanks. The three drives are actually connected to a usb hub. The first hub I had was no good so I threw it away and bought a more expensive one. The guy is the shop told me that this was the best one they had and it would not fail me. Starting to doubt his words a little now.

Yes, this external drive is used for the TM backup. The thing I am most confused about is that before I had a big system crash 3 weeks ago, everything was running fine. This made me think it may be a software glitch. I have updated all OS software, but no improvement.

Thank you so much for responding.
 
So, just the one drive is giving you problems? Or, do all three drop off?
If only that one drive, then it's not likely your computer, but more likely a flaky interface in your external drive.

But, I would also recommend that you download and reinstall the combined updater for your OS X system.
 
Thanks....

I tried unplugging this drive from the hub and rewiring things a bit so I could plug the drive directly into a usb at the back of the computer. So far, so good... If has been backing up the data using TM for a few hours now and it has not dropped out. So at the moment I am assuming that the hub is to blame.
 
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