USB thumb drive pulled and icon left on desktop - how do I remove it??

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 6:19 AM, Karl F. Larsen <klarsen1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Christian Csar wrote:
>> Assuming that when you say you tried to unmount it you mean that you
>> right clicked and selected unmount, then you could also try unmounting
>> it from the command line i.e. umount /media/disk or something similar. I
>> believe that if you mounted it in the first place, then you should not
>> need root privileges.
>>
>    You are wrong. You must be root to use mount and umount in a
> terminal. There are some GUI things that appear to let a non-root mount
> and umount and they work. But they use a root device to do it.
>
> Karl

NO... you CAN mount and umount devices as a user (non-root) in a
terminal if the device is set with the correct permissions in fstab or
hal. HOWEVER in many cases you will see a conflict because GNOME or
KDE may have mounted the device and it will be busy because it's
"owned" by those processes. SO if you log out of the GUI and use only
a console ("virtual terminal") you won't have any trouble mounting and
umounting devices as a user.

When you use sudo or root to force the device to umount you may
interfere with an active process, and/or you may corrupt data on the
device if its contents have not finished writing.