umount: /mnt/floppy: device is busy
 

i am trying to unmount my floppy drive, and i get a busy error:

$ umount /dev/fd0
umount: /mnt/floppy: device is busy

i've tried to find out why it's busy, but i can't figure it out. i'm not accessing it.

any help? please.

are you in the floppy directory when you're trying to unmount it? (edit: ie., don't be. :p) also, try running sync first, any data you transferred might still be cached in the buffer.

thanks. i'm not in the directory, but what is sync? Can i just erase the cache somehow?

Use: umount -l /dev/fd0

The -l means -lazy. I'm not kidding. =) This will make the dev unmount at the moment it stops being busy. I think the umount command actually accesses some devices whilist trying to unmount them, making that impossible. Kinda funny, isn't it?

thanks. very much appreciated.

There is a way to unmount busy drives immediately. The solution is, obviously, to find out what is using the drive and stop that process.

For example:

fuser /media/cdrom <- Gives you the processes using the drive
fuser -k /media/cdrom <- Kills the processes using the drive

Taken from: Linux tricks: unmounting unresponsive drives