Unable to eject any external

[aaron5566]

Hey guys, lately any external devices plugged into my MBPr 2016 cannot be ejected. I think the culprit is Quicktime player as any time I open a preview of a file by pressing space bar, I cannot then eject the device. I have downloaded "What's Keeping Me" and it shows the file that I have just previewed still open. I have tried opening and closing Quicktime fully but still says something is using my external even though nothing is open in the "Force Quit menu". I have also tried fixing my Mac partition through recovery mode and nothing has fixed it.

The only way I can eject my device "safely" and I put that in quotation marks is by relaunching Finder. However, upon removing the connection from my hard drive to my laptop, it makes a beeping sound only associated when I unplug without ejecting. It sounds pretty harsh as if I have just yanked it out when it's still reading a file.

Is there any way I could reinstall Quicktime without reinstall the entire OS? I would prefer not to have to reinstall everything I have just because of 1 issue. Thanks guys!

 

[Partron22]

In addition to relaunching Finder, you can often fix the bug by previewing (or whatever) a short vid you keep on the desktop of your startup disk. Relaunching closes the previous vid.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Quicklook. I think you mean Quicklook.

 

[Partron22]

Yeah, Brian. Quicklook uses bits of all sorts of different apps. It's likely the one it uses to preview vids that causes the file in use problem.

 

[aaron5566]

Apologies for the misleading title. Any ideas on how to fix this though? It's such a hassle to have to open something else just to eject my device.

 

[Pndrgnsvc]

Perhaps worth a try...

I had a similar problem though I never got close to identifying the culprit. The solution though was to launch Disk Utilities and then select "Unmount".

 

[BrianBaughn]

The answers provided aren't wrong but they don't seem very convenient, either.

I'd consider this a bug. You might be able to build a per-disk double-click solution by creating an application in Automator that first resets Quicklook and then unmounts the specific disk.

 

[aaron5566]

I did try opening another file in my desktop to refresh the system but it still won't eject. I have noticed if I force quit all quicklook services in Activity Monitor, my external can be ejected. Troublesome. I'll look into Automator.