System: Dell Inspiron 1100
Distro: Suse 9.2, kernel 2.6.8-24, KDE 3.3.0
Dual Booting with Win XP
And I'm totally new to this OS.

When is it safe to remove USB devices?
In Windows you have to click the icon in the bottom right and make sure the system is ready to let go. In Linux? Can you just pull 'em out and plug 'em in whenever you want?

Thanks for your patience and help,
James Carruthers

SUSE 9.2 uses submount for USB devices (and other hotplugable devices). This means a device is mounted as soon as you access its mountpoint (e.g. click on the drive symbol). It is unmounted after access has ended (e.g. after you closed the window). If your pendrive has some kind of status LED, you should see if is still active. In general, pulling out the drive at any time should not harm your data if you did not perform write operation on the drive. Only if something was written to it, you may need to give it some time to write the buffers to the drive.

That's simple!

Thank you!

James

Don't know about your specific system, but in Fedora Core 3 (and using Gnome) I get a desktop icon as soon as I plug in my usb flash drive. Before I pull it out I simply right click on the icon and choose 'unmount' after a few seconds the icon disappears and I can safely disconnect the device.

I believe it is fairly easy to create desktop icons for devices in KDE and you should be able to get similar behaviour.

I was wondering exactly the same thing about "stopping" the pendrive. I mount mine manually in FC3 (no icon seems to appear), and when I unmount it using umount /mnt/pendrive the LED status indicator does not stop flashing, no matter how long I leave it for. I have also tried umount /dev/sda1 to no avail.

So is it safe to just yank it out after a while? Because the only other option seems to be shutting down...

I think it is safe to unplug the drive, even if the LED is still flashing, as long as you unmounted the drive. You could try 'eject /dev/sda1'. This works well with my iPOD. But you need to re-plug it to get it recognised again.

that's the job...works nicely. Thanks!

If it makes any difference, I use various SD and MMC cards to shuttle information between home (SuSE) and work (XP). On neither system do I ever unmount or eject the drive. I just plug in, work on them, then plug out. This seems to have worked for me since I started using them. I've never had data loss or corruption. One card, 512MB SD card, I use to copy .mp3 files back and forth (to play in my Palm Pilot), the other a 128MB SD card, I use to shuttle either MySQL databases or Office documents.

I don't even get the message, "you should've closed the drive' on my XP system anymore.

HTH

I did a new install (long story) with my usb drive plugged in and now it is automatically mounted whenever I plug in and can just pull it out and plug back in without any problem. It doesn't appear to be in my fstab though so I'm lost as to the why, but it works wonders. Just to be on the safe side I've added a disk mounter to my panel to unmount before un-plugging.