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Bug 598690 - Context menu for an USB pendrive shows "Unmount", "Eject" and "Safely Remove Drive"
Context menu for an USB pendrive shows "Unmount", "Eject" and "Safely Remove ...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: nautilus
Classification: Core
Component: general
2.28.x
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail)
Nautilus Maintainers
: 573313 615320 618905 661625 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2009-10-16 14:37 UTC by Alexander Gitter
Modified: 2018-12-27 19:31 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
Screenshot of the context menu (51.92 KB, image/png)
2009-10-16 14:39 UTC, Alexander Gitter
  Details
Do not show Unmount when showing Eject/Safe removal (3.08 KB, patch)
2010-03-30 16:52 UTC, Martin Pitt
committed Details | Review

Description Alexander Gitter 2009-10-16 14:37:54 UTC
On a Gnome 2.28 desktop (Ubuntu Karmic, as of Oct 16, 2009), I get "Unmount", "Eject" and "Safely Remove Drive" in nautilus' context menu of an USB flash drive. (see attachement)

This flash drive I'm using is a Sandisk Cruzer Micro with "U3 Smart Technology". From what I've gathered, those drives contain a small partition where the "U3" installer is stored.
Now Gnome 2.26 (Ubuntu Jaunty) doesn't mount that partition, but Gnome 2.28 does. It shows up as a CD-Rom, seperate from the "actual USB drive" (that is, the data partition).
I think the context menu entries might be related to this, as the CD's context menu shows three unmount/eject/remove entries as well.


(This is also reported on Launchpad - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/453072)
Comment 1 Alexander Gitter 2009-10-16 14:39:00 UTC
Created attachment 145611 [details]
Screenshot of the context menu
Comment 2 Alexander Gitter 2009-10-16 15:04:44 UTC
I just noticed another related problem.
When I select "Safely Remove Drive", the flash drive gets unmounted and powered down and it disappears in nautilus.
However the part that gets mounted as CD-rom stays mounted but is then empty. If I now try to unmount this device, I get an error popup, saying: "umount: /media/cdrom2 mount disagrees with the fstab"
Comment 3 Steven 2009-10-17 18:45:32 UTC
All three options are shown on all of my flash drives as well. None of my flash drives are U3.
Comment 4 David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2009-10-23 17:01:53 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> I just noticed another related problem.

Please file this as a separate bug report.
Comment 5 David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2009-10-23 17:08:06 UTC
It's actually supposed to work this way since the drive actually pretends to have removable media (common bug in 99.9% of all usb sticks). And you do need all three options for an optical drive connected via USB

 - unmount - because you want to unmount the media without ejecting it
 - eject - to eject the disc
 - safely remove - to safely remove the drive without ejecting the media

It is a tempting idea to only show eject for optical drives only IF (and only if) the drive can also be safely removed (only USB connected can be safely removed for now). So for usb sticks, that would leave you with "unmount" and "safely remove drive". 

But that would leave you without an eject button in Nautilus.

So could we instead keep showing the eject button in nautilus but just "safely remove drive" when clicked? Unfortunately, no, we can't do that because of bug 597864.

So I'm afraid we need to show all three options :-(. Please reopen if you have a better idea for how to handle this. Thanks.
Comment 6 Alexander Gitter 2009-10-23 20:17:38 UTC
Would you suggest I open a seperate bug for the behavior I described in Comment 2?
I'm not quite sure if this isn't another bug I just happened to notice while playing around with this one, or if it's really the same underlying issue.
Comment 7 David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2009-10-23 20:24:35 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)
> Would you suggest I open a seperate bug for the behavior I described in Comment
> 2?
> I'm not quite sure if this isn't another bug I just happened to notice while
> playing around with this one, or if it's really the same underlying issue.

I'm pretty sure it's a different issue - and actually I'mnot sure whether there's a bug at all. But I need more information to determine that. So please file a new bug report and include the output of 'cat /etc/fstab', 'cat /proc/mounts', 'cat /etc/mtab', 'devkit-disks --dump', 'tree /dev/disk' and 'gvfs-mount -li'. Thanks.
Comment 8 David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2009-10-27 21:39:59 UTC
Expanding on comment 5 since a) it sucks to have three items; and b) many people (including me) are annoyed by it.

First, some terminology:

"safely remove drive" is intended to mean "power down the drive so it is safe for removal". Right now this is done by suspending the USB port but there's a patch pending for 2.6.32 for powering down the port completely. The effect is that the device powers off, specifically that leds on the device (if any) will be powered off. Many people have asked for this feature, certain (rare) pieces of hardware seems to require it.

(There might be a better term for option than "safely remove drive" but it's a bit late to change it for 2.28.x. - and, for the record, it's similar in name and functionality to what Windows is using.)

Second, "eject" means "eject the media" (for e.g. optical drives) or "make the annoying 'not safe to remove' banner on the device go away" (for phones, ipods, ebook readers etc.).

Third, "unmount" means well.. our beloved geek-word... also known as 'umount'. Windows, I'm told, nowadays uses "Dismount". We could remove this geek-comfort, it might be nice.
Comment 9 David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2009-10-27 21:50:18 UTC
Now for a thorough explanation of why we currently have these three options

 - Unmount
 - Eject
 - Safely remove drive

for a normal USB stick or USB card reader. It seems excessive. 

Actually it wasn't always like this. Before bug 597864, we used to collapse "Eject" and "Safely Remove Drive" into just "Eject" (with the semantics of first doing "Eject", then "Safely Remove Drive") if it looked like the drive wasn't automatically capable of physically ejecting the media (e.g. an optical drive or a zip drive). Then the user only had two options

 - Unmount
 - Eject

which seemed a bit more reasonable. Still, for optical drives connected via USB we had all three options since, well, ejecting the media is not the same as preparing the device for removal. And we still had that pesky unmount option.

But then bug 597864 roared it's head. The problem, in a nutshell, is that we don't know if the device is external or internal (see the bug and the associated fd.o bug for more discussion). So we can't just automatically hide the "Safely Remove Drive" feature behind "Eject".

Long-term it might (or might not) be nice to have a "Safely Remove Hardware" facility in the core desktop shell (that would also work for other kinds of hardware needing this treatment) but that's just not how things work right now.

We could also nuke the "Unmount" option and just tell people to use a terminal instead for doing that (or Palimpsest). I don't know if that's screwing over existing users too much though (I'm personally fine with it).
Comment 10 Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek 2009-10-28 22:05:11 UTC
I'd also be fine with removing "unmount" option from context menu. If a user wants to view their device again, they can disconnect and connect it again. If sb doesn't want to do that and they do want to unmount, not eject a device, then... then the user isn't a regular user and they know how to use a umount command - GUI option to do that is not needed, it only confuses others.
Comment 11 Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) 2009-12-02 12:48:48 UTC
You can also use GParted to unmount partitions, if you really want to do that separately from disconnecting the device. In any case, removing "Unmount" is bug 576587.

Meanwhile, the three options are continuing to confuse people:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1301556
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1303445
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1314954
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22315/
http://identi.ca/notice/14592670
http://identi.ca/notice/15035455

I realize solving this requires minds smarter than mine, but it would be nice to have "Eject" and "Power Off" for USB optical drives and just "Disconnect" for everything else.
Comment 12 David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2009-12-02 16:20:32 UTC
(In reply to comment #11)
> but it would be nice
> to have "Eject" and "Power Off" for USB optical drives and just "Disconnect"
> for everything else.

Sounds good to me in principle - one question though: why "Power Off" instead of "Disconnect" for optical drives? Seems like "Eject" and "Disconnect" are different enough so it would seem logical to use "Eject" (or "Eject Disc" even?) and "Disconnect" since people are used to seeing "Disconnect" (I'm not a native speaker so that's why I'm asking).

I'll try to find some time to clean this up - it depends on some quirk infrastructure being added (see http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24343#c21 ) so it might not happen very soon.

Reassigning to Nautilus (since that's where the patch is needed) and taking ownership of the bug.

(Btw, you are forgetting about RAID use cases (as of 2.28, Nautilus shows your MD-RAID arrays and allows you to start/stop them) - see

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/nautilus-palimpsest-assembly-shots/nautilus-mdraid-1.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/nautilus-palimpsest-assembly-shots/nautilus-mdraid-2.png

These need a bit of work too - they should probably just say "Start RAID" and "Stop RAID" instead of the current abstract mess.)
Comment 13 David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2009-12-02 16:20:59 UTC
Taking ownership of bug.
Comment 14 antistress 2009-12-09 23:59:31 UTC
1°) My Dad runs Ubuntu (well he didn't get the choice...) and the 1st thing he asked me was : "what does unmount mean" ?
However he knew that he had to do something before unplugging the usb device (yes, i was suprised to discover that he knew that) but he didn't know what "unmount" meant.

2°) Now there are 3 differents options, all related to the "remove drive" idea.
I understand that each one has a different effect.
As far as i'm concerned, i would suggest to add another option to "Unmount and change the wall paper".
I'm pretty sure that a few people would find it helpful.
Or maybe 3 options to remove a drive is already a bit too much ?

3°) i would suggest :
- to use something less tech speak that "unmount"
- to reduce the number of options. 

I'm pretty sure that only one option to "Safely Remove Drive" would be perfect
I don't think that an average user would need anything else. And i guess that an advanced would be able to use other options from a terminal
Comment 15 antistress 2009-12-10 00:00:45 UTC
(above suggestion was about USB keys)
Comment 16 Sergio Villar 2010-02-15 18:48:47 UTC
(In reply to comment #9)
> Now for a thorough explanation of why we currently have these three options
> 
>  - Unmount
>  - Eject
>  - Safely remove drive

All your reasoning seems very sensible from the technical POV, but thing is that I'd say that 99% of users in 99% of use cases plug a USB pendrive in their computers and not a ZIP or an external CD/DVD USB device. So having all these options just for very unusual use cases seems not the smartest option (at least for GNOME). Note that MacOS for example, automatically ejects DVDs when they're unmounted. That's why I believe that showing an unique understandable option is more than enough (if you're a power user and just want to unmount a DVD without ejecting it I'm pretty sure that you know how to do it in console)
Comment 17 Mario Vukelic 2010-02-15 18:54:47 UTC
I wonder why we need three options in the context menu when in the
sidebar of nautilus windows it seems to suffice to just show the "eject" icon (the icon familiar from hardware disc players that let you eject the disc, i.e., the horizontal line with a triangle on top pointing upward). 

Would this need three options, too?
Comment 18 ethan 2010-03-05 02:34:07 UTC
My .02 cents below (posted already to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/453072). It assumes that the system has a way of determining whether "eject" was successful (e.g., whether there is removable media drive, or just a single integrated hotplug device).
-------------------------------------
I understand the difference between all the options, and use all of them. I am still confused by the GUI. I think much of this is solvable with two pop-up dialogs. See examples:

USB flash (thumb) drive:
1. Insert/connect drive.
2. [automount]
3. Press eject
*4. Drive unmounts and dialog box appears: "No ejectable [removable] media found in drive. To disconnect, click 'safely remove drive.'"*
5. ["safely remove" behaves as expected]

External USB CD/DVD Burner:
1. Connect external drive
2. [automount]
3. ["eject" behaves as expected]
4. Press "safely remove"
*5. Drive ejects, and pop-up confirmation appears: "Are you sure you want to turn off power to the drive?"*
6. YES: [poweroff until reconnect] NO: [no additional action]

The case of an external USB HDD is most concerning, because the hdd can be powered up and active when the user suddenly unplugs it and regularly forces an emergency powerdown while believing they properly prepared it for removal. We now have the GUI tools to avoid this (YAY!) -- but we must have clarity.

The only remaining question for the beginning user at this point is: "Ok, so what does 'Unmount' do then?"

Since "Unmount" is a more advanced option, it is normal and ok for this to be a question for new users of Unix-like systems. They can search online for the answer, and should be directed to resources like this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount
Comment 19 Martin Pitt 2010-03-30 16:52:04 UTC
Created attachment 157516 [details] [review]
Do not show Unmount when showing Eject/Safe removal

I'm somewhat pressed to clean this up for the next Ubuntu release, so I'm going to apply this patch to Ubuntu's nautilus package.

This will remove "Umount" from the context menu if we have eject and/or safe removal, to clean up just a little bit.

This will still leave us with the weird "Eject" for almost all USB sticks out there (which falsely claim to have removable media), but as pointed out above this is highly nontrivial to solve, so let's do one step at a time.
Comment 20 Yann 2010-04-12 16:46:31 UTC
Thank you Martin to go on this way. Several French users would like it to be again more simple, as 1 option is sufficient for a normal user. Even 2 options get non-tech people confused.
Advanced users who need to work with partitions can use a specific tool/applet, or even a "nautilus-unmount" package (that would add an entry in the menu, like nautilus-gksu for example)...

Even sometimes I think no option at all would be fine: for my usb key, the system already warns if the user unplugged the device too soon ("Error while copying ..."), so I think there is no need to put a button to eject nor "Safe remove" it.
We should simplify the interface in order to concentrate on cases that can damage device or data.
Comment 21 Sergio Villar 2010-04-12 17:26:45 UTC
(In reply to comment #20)
> Thank you Martin to go on this way. Several French users would like it to be
> again more simple, as 1 option is sufficient for a normal user. Even 2 options
> get non-tech people confused.

Every non-tech user, not only French ones I guess :)

> Even sometimes I think no option at all would be fine: for my usb key, the
> system already warns if the user unplugged the device too soon ("Error while
> copying ..."), so I think there is no need to put a button to eject nor "Safe
> remove" it.

Absolutelly disagree with this. You cannot remove it and show the user an error because you give them no option to perform the right steps. And take into account that all most common desktops to it as well, OSX, Windows.
Comment 22 Yann 2010-04-12 18:23:15 UTC
> Absolutelly disagree with this. You cannot remove it and show the user an error
>because you give them no option to perform the right steps. 

The right step is to put back the key to let the system finish the operation!

>And take into
>account that all most common desktops to it as well, OSX, Windows.

is that a valid argument ? ;)
Comment 23 Cosimo Cecchi 2010-04-30 08:38:23 UTC
Review of attachment 157516 [details] [review]:

This was committed to master and gnome-2-30.

David: should I leave this bug open? What's left to do here after Martin's patch?
Comment 24 Cosimo Cecchi 2010-04-30 08:39:02 UTC
*** Bug 615320 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 25 Martin Pitt 2010-05-18 07:14:56 UTC
*** Bug 618905 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 26 Allan Day 2010-05-26 15:29:29 UTC
*** Bug 573313 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 27 C de-Avillez 2011-01-23 18:22:18 UTC
We now have Ubuntu bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/706436 which suggests a rewording of the "safely remove drive" to "power down device" (in sync with David's suggestion in comment #8 above).

This _does_ make sense: right now if we "safely remove" a -- say -- CDROM drive from a laptop (where the CDROM is in a bay), the only options to re-power the device is to {reboot, physically remove and read the drive,  power-cycle the laptop).

Safely remove is confused with Windows' action, which is more near to umount/eject than to power off.
Comment 28 Bahram Alinezhad 2011-08-11 09:19:47 UTC
There must be all 3 options available even if not altogether.
One of main advantages of linux over windows is its much more advanced behaviour on block devices. For example, in linux we can have (and use) more than one partition on a flash drive. Naturally, its disconnect actions must be more advanced than windows and emulating windows is not proper.

"Unmount" must be present for unmounting the exact device without affecting other partitions, also remaining able to mount again.

"Safe Remove" must be present for powering down the parent device (the composite usb device) and therefore unmount all its child devices.

"Eject" must be present only for optical devices to remove the media and therefore force an unmount for that device.
Note: This doesn't mean when we have "Eject" for a CD/DVD, there is no need for "Unmount"; Because a lot of times we need unmount the disk while keeping it in the drive.

Linux users have not to be in windows limitations!
Comment 29 Bahram Alinezhad 2011-08-11 09:30:55 UTC
I see it was good in Ubuntu 9.1 with a few bugs. In 10.04 and later I hate the disconnect behavior of gnome as a linux user. Now I have found the source of change: here some people requested a change in favour of windows users!!
Comment 30 André Klapper 2011-10-13 08:46:59 UTC
*** Bug 661625 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 31 Bahram Alinezhad 2011-10-16 01:11:46 UTC
I filed the bug 661625 because after two months of no attendance I thought a resolved/closed bug won't open again for discussion. sorry.
Previously developers used to encourage users to participate in forums/mailing lists in order to help projects to be improved in form of bug reports and suggestions. Now, I see them so tired that a comment gets no follow up after two monthes ;-)
Comment 32 André Klapper 2011-10-26 12:24:25 UTC
Not "tired", just busy with more important stuff.
Anyway, that's offtopic for this bugtracker.
Comment 33 Bahram Alinezhad 2011-10-26 15:17:47 UTC
Not enough contemptuous to me! As you are so a great programmer, you have the right to scorn people and their ideas as much as you want.
Good luck.
Comment 34 Bahram Alinezhad 2011-11-19 12:01:54 UTC
No answer? No comment? At least tell me from which version this change happened so that I can downgrade my Gnome to last version which had "Unmount", "Eject" and "Safely Remove".
Comment 35 William Jon McCann 2012-08-17 14:36:12 UTC
Closing as per comment 23.
Comment 36 Bahram Alinezhad 2018-08-31 13:10:46 UTC
I didn't understand how was this bug resolved! What does that patch do? Finally, what is the situation for new gnome versions: Have they "unmount" in context menu or not?
Comment 37 André Klapper 2018-08-31 13:33:42 UTC
> I didn't understand how was this bug resolved
See the ticket summary: Problem was that three things were shown. Now three things are not shown anymore. Hence the reported problem got fixed.

> Have they "unmount" in context menu or not?

No, not in the context menu of the Nautilus side bar. However, "Unmount" is the tooltip text over the Eject button in the Nautilus side bar for a USB stick.
Comment 38 António Fernandes 2018-08-31 14:58:52 UTC
If the mount is not "ejectable", then, yes,t here is "Unmount" in the context menu. Otherwise, "Eject" will implicitly perform the unmounting as well.
Comment 39 Bahram Alinezhad 2018-08-31 16:02:26 UTC
That was not clarified here that what was the final situation and so, how this bug was resolved. Even though, as we discussed, that was not a bug, rather, that was a feature removal request from Windows users who probably had problem for distinguishing between Eject, Safe-remove and Unmount. So, it was expected to resolve this bug by making these commands more descriptive to be distinguished easily; like this:
"Unmount this Volume/(Optical) Disk"
"Unmount and Eject this Optical Disk"
"Unmount all Devices and Safe-remove the Parent"
Comment 40 André Klapper 2018-08-31 16:15:54 UTC
That expectation likely will not get fulfilled, sorry...
Comment 41 António Fernandes 2018-08-31 16:24:52 UTC
I'm sorry, but this bug thread is already too long to read, and since many years have passed, and a  a lot of technological changes have happened, and newer contributors were not around at that time... So, I don't think it would be useful to reopen this now.

Instead, I'd suggest you to file a new issue detailing your use cases, how the current GNOME version deals with those use cases, the problems that arise in those use cases, and (optionally) one or more suggestions for improving the current situation.

You can report it here:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/new
Comment 42 Bahram Alinezhad 2018-09-05 11:19:20 UTC
(In reply to António Fernandes from comment #41)
> I'm sorry, but this bug thread is already too long to read, and since many
> years have passed, and a  a lot of technological changes have happened, and
> newer contributors were not around at that time... So, I don't think it
> would be useful to reopen this now.
> 
> Instead, I'd suggest you to file a new issue detailing your use cases, how
> the current GNOME version deals with those use cases, the problems that
> arise in those use cases, and (optionally) one or more suggestions for
> improving the current situation.
> 
> You can report it here:
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/new

Sensible.
I will examine the last gnome version used in "Ubuntu Mate" and file a new thread if required.
Thank you for your notice and response.
Comment 43 André Klapper 2018-09-05 11:56:09 UTC
That's very welcome if you run a recent version (currently: 3.28 and 3.30). :)