I've been running into problems with umount when trying to unmount when in KDE. First off, my root partition is read-only, therefore the mounts are only written to /proc/mounts. I can umount using the mount point, but not the device name.

The second problem is when I perform any write operation as any user on the mounted fs using KDE ("drag-and-drop", etc.) I can't umount without closing the Konqueror window which performed the operation, regardless of if any pane or emulator are currently using the fs.

The third problem is that with certain media I cannot umount period with a non-root user because the mount isn't written to mtab.

Any suggestions? Thanks.
ta0kira

Make your mount in /mnt or ~/
Add an entry to /etc/fstab as example;
/dev/hda3 /mnt/data ext3 noauto,user 0 0

$ mount /mnt/data

Just a guess, but could this be related to not being able to create an mtab file?

Firstly, although not always intuitively obvious to all people, Konqueror cannot have any focus on a file system that you want to unmount. You need to change the Konqueror directory focus to unmount that file system. With that said, however, I have noticed that Konqueror does not always release its grasp and prevents unmounting file systems even after changing the directory focus. I always have to close Konqueror in those situations. I never have tried to figure out any patterns.

Users need read-write access to the device. Here is my fstab entry for my cd-writer and floppy drive:

/dev/sr0 /media/cdwriter iso9660 noauto,users,rw,unhide 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,users,rw 0 0

Notice the users parameter.

Not being able to update it is part of the problem (/ isn't R/O until right before login), however umount is smart enough to go by /proc/mounts when it's root calling it (and even then it only goes by the mount point); as a regular user, umount doesn't look past /etc/mtab.

Well, I happen to have the pattern figured out on my machine; if I write more than about 500KB. Usually write operations less than that won't lock up the mount. This is after changing the focus in every sense of the word without closing Konqueror, by the way. I've even tried mounting sync to prevent caching. Even if the write is cached, umount will wait for the write to finish under normal circumstances, as opposed to exiting with an error.

I don't mind all that much closing Konqueror, however a lot of times I am su in the terminal emulator doing something important, and I have to re- su and cd, and my command history usually changes because the tty changes when I reopen.

This isn't the problem; I can mount as a regular user (user/users is necessary to mount in the first place as non-su.) I use the same option. Also, users shouldn't have write access to the device; not even to the mount point (they don't even need +x to the mount point.) All they need is a line in fstab to use.

Thanks for your reply.
ta0kira

PS We were tied for number of posts until I put this one up...