Linux Mint Forums

I've been trying out Linux Mint 14 MATE and it is brilliant. Thank you!

Perhaps I'm missing something, but is it possible to restore the 'safely remove' option when you right-click on a USB device to remove it? The only option available is 'eject' which unmounts but does not power off the USB device.

I even tried the Disk Utility program but the 'safely remove' option has been removed from there as well. And the 'Disk Mounter' applet also only has 'eject' as an option.

I really don't feel comfortable unplugging a USB hard drive while it is still powered up and spinning, so for the time being I open up a Terminal session and type 'sudo udisks --detach /dev/sde', which will power off the USB device.

If anyone has any suggestions to restore the 'safely remove' option it would be appreciated. Even it involves adding an applet, that would be fine. I have a number of Linux newbies using my system so I'm looking for a solution that's as simple as possible.

Many thanks in advance for your help!

I applaud your caution with usb devices, but I really think you are taking it too far. Unmounting a drive is all that is required. The command you are using is simply powering down the usb port that the device is attached to. How is that different from unplugging it? One second it has the power to spin, next second it doesn't. If it sent a 'spindown' command before removing the power from the usb port it would be different, but I don't read any thing to suggest that it does. Hdparm may be of assistance (although I know from my experience it doesn't work with a lot of Western Digital drives ) but really I wouldn't bother, unmount and unplug.

The best way to protect usb devices from harm (flash drives mostly not usb disc drives) is to disable automounting. If you have to mount something manually you will probably remember to unmount it, otherwise you might not, that is where the danger is, from my point of view automounting should be expunged form the linux kernel forever.

I think this option has been removed on GNOME 3 as it was unclear which one you should use (eject or safely remove?). Ejecting is all you need; eject the device and wait shortly for its light to stop flashing (for any cached writes that need to be completed), and then you can safely remove the device.

Technically that may be correct, but the language used doesn't seem correct as well: I associate the word 'Eject' to CD/DVD media, so when "Safely remove" vanished in my LM 14 install I thought that something had gone wrong (until I found this thread . 'Unmount' makes perfect sense to me, but then I've been using Linux since the first distros on multiple CDs were common about 1995-6, are you sure that a newbie is not confused by this "Mount" / "Unmount" thing? "Safely remove" is what Windows uses, and it sounds just about right IMHO.

Rehdon

Hi Guys

If that is true, then why does my Seagate Goflex Hdd not power down when i do "unmount". I can feel the platters spinning and LED on the HDD also is on and stable which means the HDD is ON and usable. Any idea if we have a safer alternative for removing external mass storage without corrupting them ?

Thanks
Raze

Hi

Any bump on this guys ??

Thanks
Raze

I must agree with the above posts that "safely remove" in previous versions of Gnome was different than the simple unmount command. While this may not be a matter of concern for flash drives, this is very obvious with a non-solid state hard drive. The safely remove option used to completely spin down the hard drive in a controlled way over the course of 1-2 seconds. Now, whether I unmount it or not, my external USB HD doesn't spin down, and when I pull the USB cord or shutdown my computer, the HD stops immediately and makes a not good sounding screeching sound for a quarter second as it quickly goes from thousands of RPMs to nothing. Doing this once, a dozen, a hundred times probably won't break the drive, but I imagine after a while this is going to cause some harm.

Is there a software that can have an hard disk stop after unmounting it? Would be a good alternative in this specific case, and if it were an applet (or easily reachable from the menu) I wouldn't mind using it instead of the Unmount option.

Rehdon

A little script is posted in Comment #31 here.
It seems to work close to what "Safely Remove" did.

Well that bug report was really enlightening ... and reminded me why I'm running away from GNOME/Ubuntu stuff.

Rehdon

Thank you Chris_Z for the link to that script. It seems to safely power down my external USB hard drive. Making it a launcher on one of my panels in MATE has restored this function and made it convenient to access.

I too am disheartened by the developers' response on that thread overall. It seems like larger problems were created by not thinking through the effects of disabling features to fix a not widespread and smaller problem.

ETupelo wrote:Making it a launcher on one of my panels in MATE has restored this function and made it convenient to access.

I did that also. works great.

Perhaps the same functionality could be added to one of the numerous applets handling removable devices? No idea of how difficult that would be, mind you >.<

Rehdon