umount error. cannot unmount usb disk

[Zhengguo Xu]

hi all,

recently i had a problem with unmounting a USB hard drive (formated as ext3
instead of the more common one fat32, if that matters. from what i read,
fat32 drive has the same problem). when i tried to unmount it, there's error
message says:

an application is preventing the volumn from being unmounted.

i googled a bit and the first few webs are from ubuntu forum but that
doesn't help much. here're what i did following the suggestion there:

1. sudo umount -f /media/disk/
gives following error:
umount2: Device or resource busy
umount: /media/disk: device is busy
umount2: Device or resource busy
umount: /media/disk: device is busy

by the way, why does it repeat twice? i only have 1 partition (the whole
drive formated as 1 ext3 partition)

2. lsof | grep -i /media/disk gives following infomation:

evince-th 10813   *MYNAME*    6r      REG       8,37 100095672    2359648
/media/disk/Miscellaneous/Literature/*ABCD.pdf* (deleted)

what does that mean? (i changed info about myname and ABCD.pdf, the rest is
exact what output of the command)

is this the application that prevent the unmounting? however, i didn't open
any pdf viewing software. i also stopped the process evince before
unmounting. in fact, i turned off every application i could think of.

nothing works.

so what i did is switching off computer and unplug the drive (for the fear
of damaging the drive if unpluging it directly) but that is really a pain in
the ass.

any suggestion is welcome. thanks.

ps: will removing the usb drive without unmounting it first damage the drive
itself? it seems matters when i use windows. what about it in linux?
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