Hi there.

For some reason Mac OS does not seem to like my external hard drive. It is a Free agent drive which is listed as being mac compatible (it even has a program for formatting it into the Mac file system.)

Anyway, the problem is, when I shutdown my Mac the drive continues to make noise. It is either spinning or a fan inside the drive is running.
I have sat around for 10 minutes and the drive shows no sign of stopping.

However as soon as I pull out the USB cable, the drive shuts down....pulling out the drives power cable also works, but that's not exactly a surprise.

Whenever I boot into Windows 7 and shutdown, the drive shuts down normally. So this must be a software issue.

I've looked around but the only similar issue I have found is someone who's drive needed to cool down, which is not the case with this one.

So does anyone have any ideas, reaching around to the back of my comp isn't a great, I'm also worried that whatever is causing the noise may be damaging the drive.

Thanks in advance.

Is anyone there?

Guess not?

Can you eject the drive prior to the shutdown?

I hazard a guess that drive doesn't recognize the shutdown/eject command from the Mac.

regards,
MAJ

oh yeah, it ejects just fine, but still keeps on spinning.

I've looked around and found that apparently this happens to a lot of external drives (on both Macs and Hacks) as Mac OS doesn't know how to issue shutdown commands to certain external drives. Still haven't found an actual solution.

I've found that the drive eventually shuts down, I'm not sure exactly how long it takes but somewhere between twenty minutes and three hours.