Power off USB mass storage at computer shut down??

Sorry, but this is far above my knowlege so I behave clumsily, I fear.

Dont apologise...this is where Linux comes into its own: the learning curve and the community. You're not on your own here

Okay, let's go down the checklist again to see what we missed:

issued fdisk -l in the console, can you see the external drive? What is its name?

Issued umount /dev/sdb

likely sdb is the external drive

what happens?

If you're not root, the command could be "blackholed" by bash without feedback, fdisk does that on my machine. I issue it and ... nothing.

If you can unmount the drive...but it powers up again. So it could be a persistent process (Xorg is one of them, it dies and comes back for more), okay, let's look at /etc/inittab, list it and look for the word "respawn" - those are the respawning processes. Is the process for the external drive in there?

I'll do some more digging here...the plot thickens (never understood that one ...)

Thor

Originally Posted by Thor_2.0 [B] issued fdisk -l in the console, can you see the external drive? What is its name? Issued umount /dev/sdb likely sdb is the external drive what happens? If you're not root, the command could be "blackholed" by bash without feedback, fdisk does that on my machine. I issue it and ... nothing. If you can unmount the drive...but it powers up again. So it could be a persistent process (Xorg is one of them, it dies and comes back for more), okay, let's look at /etc/inittab, list it and look for the word "respawn" - those are the respawning processes. Is the process for the external drive in there? I'll do some more digging here...the plot thickens (never understood that one ...) Thor

Name of the drive is sdc1. umount /dev/sdc1 unmounts it but doesn't turn power off.

From itittab:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6

# Example how to put a getty on a serial line (for a terminal)
#
#T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100
#T1:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS1 9600 vt100

# Example how to put a getty on a modem line.
#
#T3:23:respawn:/sbin/mgetty -x0 -s 57600 ttyS3