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How do I safely remove an external hard drive?

Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2012 2:09 am
by paulkaiser98
I installed Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon edition this morning. When I finished restoring my files from my external hard drive, I right-clicked it to safely remove the drive. However, there was no option to do so. There was only an option to unmount, which really does not turn off the hard drive. In my experience, removing the external hard drive with the light still on corrupts the hard drive/NTFS, making it unusable unless I use a Windows computer to fix it. Is there a way to completely and safely remove the hard drive (not just unmounting)? Can I add an option to Files, or can I use the terminal to safely remove it?

Re: How do I safely remove an external hard drive?

Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2012 1:24 pm
by Flemur
I'm guessing that the HD you want to remove is connected via USB, and I'm just guessing at the software you're using to access the device.

Here's my experience, none of which has messed up the NTFS partition on a USB mounted drive:
- type "sync" in a terminal before removing drive (this flushes from the IO cache to the disk). Is it necessary? I dunno.
- thunar has an "Eject" option. It'll incorrectly say that it's still writing data...ignore it.
- pcmanfm has "unmount" but no "eject" - it'll usually crash when it "unmounts" the partition.

IOW, thunar and pcmanfm are buggy and therefore suck, but they don't break the NTFS partition or drive.

Re: How do I safely remove an external hard drive?

Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2012 10:24 am
by echo33
I am having the same problem.

Re: How do I safely remove an external hard drive?

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 8:57 am
by Chris_Z
A little script is posted in Comment #31 here.
It seems to work close to what "Safely Remove" did.