Mac OS X: In use by what?

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
July 7th, 2003 • 4:40 pm

I regularly have to disconnect my external FireWire hard drive to take it with me. Most of the time, it’s not a problem. It’s just a matter of dragging one of its partitions to the trash or ejecting it.

But sometimes I get the dreaded “Cannot be ejected because it’s in use” alert. While in certain cases the culprit is obvious, in other cases I just cannot figure out which application is currently using a file that might be on this external hard drive.

So I have no choice but to close all my applications, one after the other, until I find the offending one. I really wish Mac OS X would tell me which application is currently using a file that’s on the volume I want to eject.

Then again, sometimes I’ve quit all my applications and Mac OS X still tells me that the volume is in use. In such cases the only solution is, unfortunately, to log out and log back in.

Annoying.


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