Fixing Finder Error -10810

Finder error -10810 is one of my most passionate personal hates. 10810 normally occurs when you’re accessing a bad/cheap/slow/oddly formatted external storage device, but can also crop up when using the Finder to access a remote server. The symptom? Beachball and no response from the Finder – the only option is to ‘close and relaunch’. Unfortunately, only the first half of this solution can be carried out automatically: the desktop icons will disappear, Finder will close, and you’re presented with the following error message:

Usually it takes a reboot to coax the Finder back into responsiveness, but this trick has worked more often than not for me:

• Open a Terminal window – you still have access to the Dock, but if it’s not in there you can search for it in Spotlight – and navigate to /Volumes
• List the directory contents with ls and find the name of the drive/FTP server/etc… which has become problematic.
• We can now force the system to unmount the disk. When this last happened to me, I was browsing an FTP server called ‘pub’, so I typed:

sudo umount pub

• Substitute in the name of your problem disk, and after the disk unmounts, the Finder will open immediately.

Hopefully this will save you a reboot some day.