Help unmounting USB stick

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 06 April 2006 07:40, Mats Holmberg wrote:

> One more comment. I had similar troubles with a 128M usb stick. It
> mounted only once after reboot, and many times even hanged my
> computer when I unmounted and pulled it out. The problem was that
> after pressing 'eject' Ubuntu told me was unmounted (removed icon
> from desktop), but actually it still had something to do. I watched
> the led on the stick, and it didn't go out until after a while
> after I had pressed eject. So all I now have to do is wait a bit
> before actually pulling my stick out of the port. Works well that
> way, and mounts/unmounts normally without reboot.

I had similar hassles with a 256M stick recently - one day it just 
stopped working. lsusb found it, all relevant modules were loaded but 
nothing in /sys for the stick, and the LED didn't flash as it should 
when inserted. The stick itself was OK and it worked fine in another 
windows box.

The cure was to cold boot the linux box - power it down for a minute 
then reboot. It seems some chipsets have wonky usb chips that can 
lock up for no good reason and require removal of power to reset 
themselves. In other words, a simple reboot doesn't cut it.

It's worth a try.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five