can't unmount usb hd

[Robert Holtzman]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2008, Matt Graham wrote:

> From: Robert Holtzman <holtzm at cox.net>
>> I have a 360 Gb external drive. When I back up my system (that has 3
>> linux distros installed) with Clonezilla, the drive appears mounted as 7
>> separate [partitions] (/media/disk, /media/disk-1 thru /media/disk-6).
>
> FTFY.  ("disk" != "partition", remember.)

I know. I was just stating how the computer showed it.

> You have an automounter of
> some type running.  I *HATE* automounters, and I always turn them off,
> but YMMV.  Which version of which distro are you running?  Check its
> docs for how to turn off the automounter, or how to live with the
> automounter if you decide you want it.

Would an automounter run amok with one usb device and not another? There 
is no problem with my 2 Gb key drive. Also, do you know of a reason the 
problem would appear after some months of functioning correctly?

>> itself is weird but isn't the main problem. The real hangup is that I
>> can't unmount any of them. If I run umount as root on them the icon
>> will disappear from the desktop but /etc/mtab and "ls /media" both show
>> them all as still mounted.
>
> Automounter again.  The default seems to be that if a filesystem has
> not been accessed for more than 60 seconds, it will be umounted.  If
> you have some sort of indexing program like beagle running, it'll
> of course be running over everything.  To figure out which processes
> are using a file (or a filesystem), use lsof or fuser.  HTH,

I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 and there is a package named Tracker that is an 
indexing program. I think it was running at the time but I'm not sure. I 
need to do some more digging.

Thanks for the reply.

-- 
Bob Holtzman
A fair fight is the result of poor planning.