Every now and then I’ll be connected to a server on my Mac with a very specific volume mounted, but then it doesn’t appear anywhere in Finder. When I try to reconnect to it, it’s grayed out, as if I was connected after all.

For a while, the only way I knew how to fix it was to restart, but that’s obviously most inconvenient.

Turns out, there is quite a simple solution, and that is to unmount the volume via the command line.

Open up Terminal and type in the following:

sudo umount -f "/Volumes/NameOfVolume"

Replacing “NameOfVolume” with your volume’s name. After you hit ENTER, type in your Mac’s password when prompted.

Once that’s done, reconnect to the server in Finder (COMMAND + K), select the volume that was previously grayed out, mount it, and now it’ll be in Finder again for you to browse.

Featured image by James Kovin.

Comments (3)

Previously posted in WordPress and transferred to Ghost.

Chris Irwin
February 13, 2018 at 6:23 pm

Thank you so much for this post. It was so frustrating, not seeing the shares in finder and also not being about to reconnect to the server to mount them. Manually unmounting this way does fix this issue, thanks.

Another solution I tried diskutil unmount /Volumes/NameOfVolume didn’t work. I wonder what the difference is between these commands, other than the elevated permission?

NG
October 16, 2018 at 4:04 pm

Thanks!

Mike L
September 24, 2020 at 9:31 pm

Thanks! Worked perfectly. I just had to remove the quote and line break in the code sample — everything surrounding the path.