GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 319208
desktop/nautilus right-click umount problem
Last modified: 2008-04-05 11:02:34 UTC
Version details: 2.12.1 Distribution/Version: Ubuntu Breezy Forwarded from: http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17997 When right-click on a icon on the desktop or under Nautilus to umount a partition on an external USB hard disk, the command would umount ALL partitions on the external drive and displayed the error "Unable to eject media" It seems to mistaking the hard disk partition for a CD/DVD media. This problem does not exist in Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary. PS: The umount command seems to work OK if using the terminal.
I can confirm this bug.
Most likely this is a case of Gnome-VFS getting bad data from HAL. There is a "storage.requires_eject" HAL property that is probably being set to true when it should be set to false. You can inspect the HAL device tree with hal-device-manager
The bug is still present on Nautilus 2.14.1 on Ubuntu Dapper, with HAL 0.5.7. The USB device I am trying to eject is a USB hard disk, partitioned into NTFS, Fat32 and Ext3. The NTFS and Fat32 partitions work and eject without problem, and unmount when I try to unmount the Ext3 partition. When I try to unmount the Ext3 partition, I am told that the device is busy. Getting the fuser ("file user") on the device's mount point yields no information at all, as though it were not in use. Using the "fuser -k" command as root does not help; I still get the error in Nautilus. If I "killall nautilus", then when Nautilus comes back up *immediately* unmount the drive, it works fine. Waiting any amount of time before unmounting will sometimes cause the error to reappear. The error sometimes does not appear - just now when I unmounted my hard disk, it worked beautifully first try. If it helps, the mount-point is /media/sdf3. Gnome-Volume-Manager had originally wanted to mount it in the /tmp directory, but I was insistant.
I'm getting this same problem with Gnome 2.18 and HAL 0.5.9. I cant eject the cd with either right clicking and ejecting or pressing the cdrom drives eject button. It does work with eject /dev/cdrom though.
This is hopefully fixed with 2.22 and the new GVfs infrastructure. Please reopen this bug (with detailed information) if you can still reproduce it with 2.22 and feel free to report any other bug you find, thanks!