Re: safely remove USB hard drive

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Thanks for the input, folks.

Using the GUI is not terribly convenient, because I have to open the
"Computer" folder, identify and select the correct partitions from among
the other items there (filesystem & other devices; maybe a whole bunch
of stuff if Nautilus is showing all your mounted partitions). But it
does work.

It's probably better to use the GUI from the desktop, from the
standpoint that applications that need to know about a device being
removed can be notified.

I was more interested whether someone had a way to "eject" the device
(i.e. a single 'thing') without having to deal with all the partitions
separately. In fact, it seems like it would be a win all around if the
'drive' appeared as a directory, and then the partitions on the drive
were mounted under that. Ejecting or unmounting the drive object would
then unmount all the partitions.

In fact, "eject /dev/sdd" works perfectly--even the desktop is updated
correctly--the only problem is that I have to poke around in the logs to
see what 'sd' device name the drive is using. Exposing that on the
desktop somewhere would be perfect.

Anyone know how Windows or Mac handle this? My USB HD has only one FAT
partition, so I can't test it easily.

Maybe this is all moot, as most people won't partition external
hard drives ;-) I happen to be using mine for access to retired system
drives, and some of them have 6 or more partitions.

I'm not convinced that using sync(1) would be effective, especially from
the desktop environment where who knows what processes have something
open on a pluggable device. Sync would be prudent if you were moving raw
data blocks to a device, but not for mounted filesystems.

Eject(1) calls unmount on the device; unmount guarantees that all
OS-cached data are flushed before the device is unmounted. I can't
/prove/ that easily, but I can't see how it would be a sane design
otherwise. There's no real advantage in using 'eject' instead of
'umount'; eject is nice for some removable media and it's simpler to
just use the same command for all removable media, even if some of them
can't physically eject anything.

Thanks again.

<Joe

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