<div dir="ltr">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? </div>