Home » Questions » Computers [ Ask a new question ]

How Can I Force Unmount a Network Device on Mac?

How Can I Force Unmount a Network Device on Mac?

Hey guys, I currently do CMD + K in Finder to connect to my Windows computer to be able to browse and use its network shares (i.e. smb://MyPC). It works fine, but sometimes when I click on it, maybe after having the MacBook go to sleep, it sits there loading and it stays that way, it doesn't show the list of shares anymore. What I want to do is obviously unmount the 'computer' (I know I didn't mount the computer, but how else can I say it) so that I can re-connect using the same method. I click on the eject button on the left, but then it says that:

Asked by: Guest | Views: 421
Total answers/comments: 1
Guest [Entry]

"I've been having this problem for a while now also, but the force unmount turned out to work when applied to the other dead network mount (I had two network mounted that had wedged themselves somehow). I'm not sure if this is just due to a change in the OS at some point (I'm on 10.6.4 atm.), and the unmount command required the full path (as in sudo umount -f /Volumes/Share) because it could not resolve the path properly otherwise and would get stuck anyway.

Once the wedged mount was removed the finder restarted finally (I'd killed it without it restarting properly), and the other mount was removable at that point too (I had another terminal hung trying to unmount that drive so I'm not sure which happened first).

In my case I couldn't reboot without the reboot cycle getting wedged also forcing me to use the powerbutton to turn the machine off.

This solution comes from a blog post, which also contained the steps needed to diagnose which volume to unmount first.

So the steps to solve the issue would
be:


Run “lsof” in terminal
See about what smb mounts it complaints
sudo umount -f [any_failing_smb_mount]


Where lsof tells you which drives to try unmounting from the errors,

lsof: WARNING: can't stat() smbfs file system /Volumes/[smb2]
Output information may be incomplete.
assuming ""dev=2d000005"" from mount table

Hope this helps somewhat... even if it is somewhat after you ran into the problem."