Unmounting USB?

[timonoj]

Hi, i'll explain my prob: I inserted an SD card into my laptop. It's detected and mounted properly in matter of seconds. It works perfectly. But when i'm done, i want to unmount it, so i can use another SD card that i have. But it tells me:

umount: /media/sdc1 is not in fstab (neither you are the root user). Check that the device is properly connected

What could i do? If ANY USB device that I plug MUST be firstly on the fstab, i don't think it's a big deal...I guess it should be any other way to do this automatically, innit?
Thanks a lot!

[coolclassic]

Re: Unmounting USB?

How are you unmounting?

I kde I right click the icon on desktop and select safely remove.

[timonoj]

Re: Unmounting USB?

Yeah, that's what i do...then it tells me that error message.

[askrieger]

Re: Unmounting USB?

Idon't know if you finally found a solution to this problem, but from the error message, it appears that you might be able to unmount with the command "sudo umount /dev/sdc1".

[timonoj]

Re: Unmounting USB?

Thanks askrieger, i'll try this in a while...But the problem is i can't right-click on the icon and choose the unmount option. I can't do it in the desktop, i find annoying having some functionalities in graphics mode, and having to load a console for some others.

[askrieger]

Re: Unmounting USB?

Personally, I use 6 desktops. I have Konsole always open in 1, Konq always open in 2, Firefox always open in 3, and Amarok always open in 6. I use 4 and 5 for programs I open and close like digikam, emacs, synaptics, and kdar.

Back to your problem: You could add your card reader to /etc/fstab. If it's a usb device that gets plugged in and unplugged you'll need some udev trickery, but if it's a builtin that's always at /dev/sdc1 all you need to add to /etc/fstab/ is the line

/dev/sdc1<tab>/media/card<tab>vfat<tab>rw,user,noauto<tab>0<tab>0

and you're done. The notation <tab> means hit the tab key.

[groenem]

Re: Unmounting USB?

I get the same message when I try to unmount my FlashDrive. In the beginning it worked fine, but not anymore.

I right-clicked on the icon to "Safely Remove" and I have tried using "sudo umount /dev/sdc1" in commandline. In commandline it says the device is busy, but I don't have any application open.

There are always 2 users logged in on my PC at the same time. Could this be a problem? I have tried logging out the other person, but it still give the message.

Why was it working in the beginning, but not now anymore?

[askrieger]

Re: Unmounting USB?

groenem: The two users probably doesn't matter, although at this point, i don't know enough to be sure. If any program that referenced the device e.g. Konqueror is still open, the device may be considered busy. This was the behavior of KDE up to at least 3.3 (maybe 3.4). So I would close konq and anything else that used the flash drive before try to remove it. I have no idea why it stopped being removable. What did you change?

[groenem]

Re: Unmounting USB?

All applications and Konqueror was closed. All I did so far was to install 3 packages for the Afrikaans language.

kde-i18n-af
language-pack-af-base
openoffice.org-l10n-af

I can't see that this could have caused the problem.

[askrieger]

Re: Unmounting USB?

I can't see that this could have caused the problem.

Nor can I

First, are you having permissions as timonoj had? If so, try to use sudo from a konsole to umount the drive. Second, does it come up with a different device node every time you insert it or is it always the same one. If the latter, add it to fstab.

[groenem]

Re: Unmounting USB?

I did try it as root user as mentioned before, but it says device busy. It does keep the same device node, e.g. /dev/sd0.

I don't have a clue how fstab works. I have seen it once, but I don't know what all the switches and numbers represent and to know which one to use etc...

[randcoop]

Re: Unmounting USB?

The unmounting of auto-mounted devices is Kubuntu is not perfect, to say the least. Frequently, the system seems to believe that a device is busy when it is not.

But I don't see this as much of a problem for you. If you are certain that the device is not busy (still copying files, for example), then you don't need to unmount it before you remove it. The reason to unmount first is to make sure that it's not busy.

Alternatively, leave the device connected until you shut down the computer; the system will automatically unmount the devices at that time.

[timonoj]

Re: Unmounting USB?

Yeah, well...But if the mounted thing is a card reader, whenever you change your card, you need to remount it with the new card! Is like having a CD-ROM, you change the CD inside, but the unit keeps showing the files on the last CD!

[binary2k2]

Re: Unmounting USB?

You could try running:
sudo fuser /media/[mount point]
or
sudo fuser /dev/sd0
to see if any process is using it
if it is you can see what the process behind the PID is with
ps aux|grep [PID]|grep -v grep

[askrieger]

Re: Unmounting USB?

But, you don't really need to know which process is represented by the pid. You can kill it with the konsole command "kill -9 <pid>" where <pid> is the pid identified by fuser. Of course, if it's init.d..., so, it's probably a good idea to identify it. It's probably something innocuos though, like konq or maybe even hald, that can be restarted without a reboot.