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I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and connecting USB Flash Drives and External USB Hard Drives regular basis, I'm able to Eject my USB Flash Drive but I can't Eject or Safely Remove the External USB Hard Disks, It's seems Ubuntu provide only Unmount feature for External USB Hard Disks. external hard drives are spinning devices so Unmount won't sufficient to physically remove it.

Ubuntu provide Eject feature for USB Flash Drives

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But Ubuntu does not provide Eject or Safely Remove feature for External USB Hard Drive

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Is it a Bug in Ubuntu 14.04 or i'm missing something?

dimi
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4 Answers4

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You just have to Unmount the disk.

lapisdecor
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From a different answered question [ Is there any way to turn off a USB HDD manually? ] I use:

sync
eject /dev/sdX
sudo hdparm -y /dev/sdX

where 'X' is the drive you want to powerdown.

This worked for my USB attached Seagate backup drive. Before issuing the command I could hear and feel the drive spinning. After the hdparm command, the drives 'power' light was lit but the drive had stopped spinning.

I use the the 'sync' command to synchronize any cached writes before the spin-down and the 'eject' to force an unmount of any of the /dev/sdX partitions. Don't know if it's needed, but it makes me feel better.

dave58
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Use umount with Force option. if your device is /dev/sdb1, use:

sudo umount -f /dev/sdb1
Mostafa Ahangarha
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This probably means you still have something accessing the disk. You have to hunt for it (in my case, it was an LVM volume group that was still active, which I had to de-activate using vgchange -a n $volgrp_name but this is a bit of a special case I suppose).

Once you are certain that you no longer have anything accessing the disk, using the Umount option in the GUI is safe and/or the UI option will change by itself to "Safely Remove".

If the drive is still spinning you can use hdparm to tell is to go to sleep, as in:

hdparm -Y /dev/sdX

(replace sdX with your drive letter). According to the man page, the -Y option does this:

Force an IDE drive to immediately enter the lowest power consumption sleep mode, causing it to shut down completely [...]

sxc731
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