MacOS – How to easily mount a Windows share from the Mac

I've been having this problem for a while now also, but the force unmount turned out to work when applied to the other dead network mount (I had two network mounted that had wedged themselves somehow). I'm not sure if this is just due to a change in the OS at some point (I'm on 10.6.4 atm.), and the unmount command required the full path (as in sudo umount -f /Volumes/Share) because it could not resolve the path properly otherwise and would get stuck anyway.

Once the wedged mount was removed the finder restarted finally (I'd killed it without it restarting properly), and the other mount was removable at that point too (I had another terminal hung trying to unmount that drive so I'm not sure which happened first).

In my case I couldn't reboot without the reboot cycle getting wedged also forcing me to use the powerbutton to turn the machine off.

This solution comes from a blog post, which also contained the steps needed to diagnose which volume to unmount first.

So the steps to solve the issue would be:

1. Run “lsof” in terminal
2. See about what smb mounts it complaints
3. sudo umount -f [any_failing_smb_mount]

Where lsof tells you which drives to try unmounting from the errors,

lsof: WARNING: can't stat() smbfs file system /Volumes/[smb2]
     Output information may be incomplete.
     assuming "dev=2d000005" from mount table

Hope this helps somewhat... even if it is somewhat after you ran into the problem.

According to the Simple Help discussion Overview: The OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Finder, the scope of the two view options commands is as follows:

• Always Open in xxx View: Applies only to that specific folder.
• Set as Default: Applies to all folders opened in that particular view, meaning that it sets the defaults for that view as opposed to the defaults for that folder. (In my original question, the answer is #1.)

Armed with this knowledge, my problem must stem from old .DS_Store files in some folders as to why in certain folders the text size deviates from my default 10 point default.

Deleting .DS_Store Recursively in Folders

My frustration and confusion from seeing folders open not using my defaults appears to have stemmed from old .DS_Store files from folders that I had copied over from an older machine. To resolve, I recursively deleted the folders as follows using Terminal:

cd ~/Folder with bad views
sudo find . -name ".DS_Store" -depth -exec rm {} \;

Kudos to the Adobe TechNote Removing .DS_Store files on Macintosh OS X? for providing this command to delete recursively.