can't unmount usb hd

[Alan Dayley]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Robert Holtzman <holtzm at cox.net> wrote:
> 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 disks (/media/disk, /media/disk-1 thru /media/disk-6). That in
> 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.
>
> Can anyone give me a hint?

I have a 160GB external USB drive with two partitions.  On OpenSUSE
10.3 and Kubuntu 8.04 it gets mounted as /media/disk and
/media/disk-1.  I usually interact with it from the GUI.  Each distro
behaves a bit differently.

OpenSUSE
When I unmount one of them the file system is closed but a dialog pops
up that it cannot eject the device.  But that partition is not mounted
anymore.  Then when I unmount the other partition both icons go away
and I unplug it.

Kubuntu
When I unmount one of them the file system is closed and there is no
dialog.  The icon remains.  Then I unmount the other and it's icon
still remains.  If I click the icon to get the menu, the "Mount"
option is visible, indicating to me that it is not mounted.  When I
unplug the drive, the icons disappear.

Admittedly I have not looked at mtab during these steps to see when
"true" unmounting has occurred.  I am trusting the icons and menus to
tell me it's safe to unplug.  So maybe my experience doesn't help you
much.  I have not had disk corruption following the above sequences.

Maybe the file system really is unmounted, depending on how Clonezilla
handles the unmount event and subsequent configuration state updates.

Alan