Do you have this problem with Ubuntu Edgy and USB sticks ?

If I copy a big file to my USB stick, one that will take a while, from the
command line, then go and do a "Safely Remove" right away (right click on desktop icon), then the stick is unmounted without waiting for the file copying to be
finished, resulting in invalid file size and truncated contents in the USB stick.
Anybody else experiencing this ? Can you try ?

That would be expected behavior. Why in the world would you want to unmount it knowing that there is a file operation going on?

Originally Posted by xjlittle That would be expected behavior. Why in the world would you want to unmount it knowing that there is a file operation going on?

Thats kinda what I was thinking, what did you expect, everything to work great with half the file copied?

IGF

Ubuntu is better behaved than that. Right click and select eject. Any writes in progress are completed and a pop up progress bar is displayed.

Correct, {x,k}ubuntu is actually very smart and will pop-up a dialog telling you
to wait. I think they correctly monitor the USB bus. Now on Edgy it is broken for me.
It was working beautifully on Dapper.

Now let em say this, the attitude of the first 2 posters is why we still have trouble
getting ubuntu into the mainstream. "It's the users fault!" , heh, that is the same
attitude of Microsoft documentation.

Thanks for the third poster (fragos) to actually contribute.

Originally Posted by kubuntu_user Correct, {x,k}ubuntu is actually very smart and will pop-up a dialog telling you to wait. I think they correctly monitor the USB bus. Now on Edgy it is broken for me. It was working beautifully on Dapper. Now let em say this, the attitude of the first 2 posters is why we still have trouble getting ubuntu into the mainstream. "It's the users fault!" , heh, that is the same attitude of Microsoft documentation. Thanks for the third poster (fragos) to actually contribute.

It wasn't an attitude at all, to me its common sense. I'd say 90% of the problems with Ubuntu, are user related(the ones I have/had in the past included)....

IGF

I copied a 600+Meg ISO from USB to HDD on Edgy, selected Eject and got a progress bar. Mine is working fine.

Originally Posted by IndyGunFreak It wasn't an attitude at all, to me its common sense. I'd say 90% of the problems with Ubuntu, are user related(the ones I have/had in the past included).... IGF

OK, so how do you solve the problem? How do you tell when your copy to/from USB is complete?

Originally Posted by kubuntu_user OK, so how do you solve the problem? How do you tell when your copy to/from USB is complete?

Well, I've copied my back up file folders to an external USB drive, and there was always a progress timer. When it hits Zero, I presume it to be done. Roughly 4gigs of Music, about 20-25gigs of videos, broken down into folders of probably 5gigs each, and some other misc. files/folders that probably take up another 5-6gigs.

Its always worked that way for me, I have no idea what your problem is. As for when I unmount it, it unmounts almost immediately, but I do get the progress bar you mention for about 1sec.

IGF

oops, wrong thread.

Originally Posted by IndyGunFreak Well, I've copied my back up file folders to an external USB drive, and there was always a progress timer. When it hits Zero, I presume it to be done. Roughly 4gigs of Music, about 20-25gigs of videos, broken down into folders of probably 5gigs each, and some other misc. files/folders that probably take up another 5-6gigs. Its always worked that way for me, I have no idea what your problem is. As for when I unmount it, it unmounts almost immediately, but I do get the progress bar you mention for about 1sec. IGF

Well, I tested this on Kubuntu Edgy and Edgy x86_64: started the copy of large files to
USB stick from the command prompt (I use large files so it will take a little while):
$ cp mylargfile /media/usbstick

Then I immediately go to the USB stick icon on desktop and do "Safely Remove". In Dapper,
this was a good way of telling when the copy was finished, because it will pop up the progress
bar and refuse to unmount until ready.

Now on Edgy I lost that dialog, furthermore the unmount occurs, truncating my files being
copied.

Originally Posted by kubuntu_user Well, I tested this on Kubuntu Edgy and Edgy x86_64: started the copy of large files to USB stick from the command prompt (I use large files so it will take a little while): $ cp mylargfile /media/usbstick Then I immediately go to the USB stick icon on desktop and do "Safely Remove". In Dapper, this was a good way of telling when the copy was finished, because it will pop up the progress bar and refuse to unmount until ready. Now on Edgy I lost that dialog, furthermore the unmount occurs, truncating my files being copied.

I'm experiencing *exactly* the same problem as you. I have even tried to manually do a 'sync' before choosing the "Safely Remove" option, but still corrupts the last file transferred.

I'm running kubuntu in the machine where I experienced this; haven't detected this problem in my ubuntu install on another machine (both are edgy).

If you found out new information about this problem, or even got to a solution, please drop a line! Thanks.

Right click the device icon and select eject. It insures all IO is complete, you may see a progress bar, and then dismounts.

Originally Posted by fragos Right click the device icon and select eject. It insures all IO is complete, you may see a progress bar, and then dismounts.

No, that's not working. There is no progress bar at all with kubuntu, right-clicking and selecting "Safely Remove" (if I'm correct, "Eject" appears only in ubuntu -no 'k') dismounts the device (at least theoretically) almost inmediately, but you can still notice by the led on the USB stick that there is pending traffic being completed; and if you type 'sync' on a terminal the command clearly stalls while there is still some writing done to the device.

In fact, this behaviour is the reason of existence of this thread, as kubuntu_user explained in the first post. It seems a kubuntu/edgy related issue that probably doesn't affect other flavours of the distro; but, as illogical as it may seem, it's definitely happening.

There are certainly differences between KDE and Gnome. To be more accurate I should have commented in Ubuntu the progress bar only appears when there are buffers to flush to the device. I normally only see it if I've copied a large directory to a flash device and almost never for single files. Some readers have both a mounted light and an activity light. Mine has single LED for both. In neither case are the the LEDs an absolute indicator that the buffer is flushed.