Linux Mint Forums

I have a Macbook Pro, early 2012, and I have installed Mint on it with great success. I only have found problems with my Seagate 1T external harddrive. When it is connected, the system goes slow. When I try to copy something from it, the system goes very slow.

The drive have a light that turns off when ejected (it happens properly in both Mac OS X and Windows 7), but when I unmount it on Mint, the icon is still there on Devices* in Nemo, and the light is still on. When I touch it, I can feel it is on.

Thank you whoever can help me.


* My Mint is in Portuguese, I suppose the name of the list in English is Devices. Is the list that have all partitions, internal and external.

Your drive icon will remain both on your desktop and in Nemo, even after the device is unmounted. That is a 'feature' of Mint. You don't really 'eject' the USB drive with Mint, you just umount the device.

Note that a file system cannot be unmounted when it is `busy' - for example, when there are open files on it, or when some process has its working directory there, or when a swap file on it is in use. The offending process could even be umount itself - it opens libc, and libc in its turn may open for example locale files. A lazy unmount avoids this problem.

From the man page for umount. If you have a swap partition on the drive, you would have to force the unmount, and even that may not work. Look at the man page for swapoff, and use gparted or other partitioning software to look for a swap partition on the drive.

First of all, sorry it took me so long to respond, I had to resolve other issues with my machine.

Back to the problem. All my pendrives eject correctly, with the icon disapearing, only the external harddrive have this issue.

I used gparted, there was no swap, but there was some free space. FIrst, I just resized the ntfs partition, same problem. Then, I just wiped everything out and create a new blank one, again, same problem.

And is not simply an OCD problem with the icon. The drive is actually on, I can fill it vibrating. If I unmount and just umplug it, my files will be damaged. I tested it.