my preferred way of unmounting a complaining usb stick is to pull it from the socket, unlike a cdrom which can be refused you. just make sure you're not writing any data to it at the time...

Weird weird stuff. I still think it is related, because it implies some device not being released or shared by the system. In the case of the usb key, you can't unmount; on the other hand, the sound device cannot be used by another application, because some other application is accessing it.

Whatta you guys think? I am still trying to figure out the way to release the sound device once firefox is using it, without having to shutdown firefox. In some cases, i even have to restart my machine so i can have xmms working again.

i've already replied how you can figure out what's using your devices. why not try and report back?

If you are running a GUI and have "System Monitor" in your menus, you can use that instead of 'mount', 'ps' and 'kill' below.

Step-by-step in a terminal:

1. Open a terminal
2. 'mount' will tell you which devices are mounted where
3. sudo fuser -cv /dev/sda8

(where /dev/sda8 is the mounted device)

fuser will show you which PIDs (process IDs) are accessing the device.

To directly kill the process:
1. kill <PID>

To find out more about the process:
1. ps -fp <PID>

(you may have to use 'sudo ps -fp <PID>' if the process was started by another user)

If you run ps and see the process is still there after you tried kill, the process might not be responding any more. Then you can force it to close (but you risk losing data the process has in memory)

1. kill -9 <PID>

The only time I have seen 'kill -9' unable to kill a process is where the process is working with broken hardware.

I think u r in the mounted directory...so u should first change the current directory..then try to umount usb drive...