Confirm Unmounting/Ejection of Drive During Shutdown in Logs for Yosemite 10.10.4 I shut down my laptop today on my way out of the house, which had a drive connected via USB. I was wondering if there is a way to confirm that the drive was successfully unmounted/ejected during the shutdown process before I unplugged it?

In other words, to ensure that shutdown had completed and that the drive was powered down? I was in a hurry, and unfortunately am not sure.

I checked the console for log entries, but couldn't find anything verbose about the shutdown process.
Not sure if this will be of much help however...

With Console open and system.log selected I ejected a USB Drive and removed it from the USB Port.  By all outward appearance the drive appeared to be properly and successfully unmounted, ejected and then removed.

These are the only entries that appeared in the system.log file upon doing so:

Aug 12 10:43:21 Computer.local com.apple.SecurityServer[17]: Succeeded authorizing right 'system.volume.removable.unmount' by client '/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app' [51235] for authorization created by '/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app' [51235] (100013,0)
Aug 12 10:43:21 Computer.local com.apple.SecurityServer[17]: Succeeded authorizing right 'system.volume.removable.unmount' by client '/usr/sbin/diskarbitrationd' [18] for authorization created by '/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app' [51235] (100002,0)
Aug 12 10:43:23 Computer.local com.apple.SecurityServer[17]: Succeeded authorizing right 'system.volume.removable.unmount' by client '/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app' [51235] for authorization created by '/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app' [51235] (100013,0)
Aug 12 10:43:23 Computer.local com.apple.SecurityServer[17]: Succeeded authorizing right 'system.volume.removable.unmount' by client '/usr/sbin/diskarbitrationd' [18] for authorization created by '/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app' [51235] (100002,0)


I'd image if it wasn't properly unmounted, ejected and removed you might get a warning when you plug it back in.  Or there may be an error message in the system.log file however I do not when to improperly remove a drive to test, you'll have to do that. :)

One thing I do every once in a while, because I'm constantly moving USB Drives around, is to use Disk Utility to Verify Disk and Verify Permissions on my external drives just to keep them healthy.