On Thursday 03 November 2005 10:24, Anand Buddhdev wrote:
On Thursday 03 November 2005 10:18, Fergus Wilde wrote:
As I understand it, if it mounts automagically, you don't have to unmount it.
That's right, you wait for activity to finish and then you can just pull the plug. SuSE will automatically see the disk is gone and then is quite happy. You're wasting your time trying to unmount manually, don't worry about it.
I've been doing this with CF and SD card readers for months now with no worries.
Ok, thanks for this advice. Do you think it would be ok even if the external disk has an ext2 file system on it? I have a Lacie external USB disk, which I use to backup my files, and I formatted it as ext2. I know that it gets mounted with the sync option, so in theory, all my data should be on the disk when the command completes, but I want to be sure.
I haven't done this using a disk with ext2 on it, so I don't know for sure. I was talking about the flash cards (typically from cameras) mentioned by the OP (I think). But if your disk is being mounted magically under /media, and the mount type is sync, then the same should apply: once you're sure file operations have finished, there is no cache waiting to be flushed and thus you should be fine to just pull the plug. I have actually had difficulty getting my external disk to mount as it should under /media, so I've made it a conventional mountpoint in /etc/fstab and am mounting and umounting it by hand. You could always go that route; then you'll know you've successfully umounted the disk before removing the device. But AFAIK you'd be fine doing it the first way. HTH Fergus