Trick with USB drives

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 01:50 -0400, Matt Patterson wrote:
> I don't know if anyone has ever had this, but...If you have for example 
> a usb stick drive plugged in and mounted, but you forget and unplug it, 
> then sometimes you can't unmount it. You definitely can't unmount it 
> unless you plug the stick back in. The trick is to use the mknod command 
> to create in the /dev/ directory a node identical to the one that was 
> there when the device was connected, then unmount the drive. Then you 
> can delete the node you created.
> 
> I have a flky usb card so I have this a lot, this is the best solution I 
> have found.
> 
> Matt

I don't think this is a good thing to do in such cases.  If this ever
happened to you again, try 'umount -r -l /dev/media_node'.

>From the "umount" manual:

-r
        In case unmounting fails, try to remount read-only.

-l
        Lazy  unmount.  Detach the filesystem from the filesystem
        hierarchy now, and cleanup all references to the filesystem as
        soon as it is not busy anymore.  (Requires kernel 2.4.11 or
        later.)


Ziyad.