External drive wont dismount
 

I have a 100gb external USB hard drive. I downloaded about 50gb of files to it. I had transmission downloading a torrent to it but it was taking a long time so I stopped it about 2 hours ago.

I closed transmission a half hour ago and tried to dismount the drive. Now I'm getting "Writing data. To prevent data loss wait until this has finished before removing or disconnecting media". It's been sitting at this for about half an hour now and I need the drive! I have no idea what it's writing but it shouldnt be writing anything...there wasnt anything that was being transfered to/from the drive. How do I safely dismount this thing? It seems like the "safe dismount" is stuck

Basically fresh installation of 10.04. Any help whatsoever is greatly appreciated!!

Use fuser to find out which program is using the device node and/or mounted directory, then kill that program.

Thanks I tried fuser -km /dev/sdd and fuser -km /media/Backup HardDrive and it doesnt give any errors but the drive still isnt dismounted :\ I tried umount -f /dev/sdd and /media/Backup HardDrive but that says it's not mounted. However the Drive Utility says it's still mounted and of course the "Writing Data" box is still "working" :(

We don't know how your external drive is formatted (so just how resilient the filesystem might be). But you interrupted your torrent anyway. I admit that I do not know much about torrents.

If you can't close the "Writing data" box, then I'd just pull the drive plug. But I tend to be reckless, and recover later (or remember not to do that again). Maybe you should not do that ;)

You could run a ps -Al and then kill the process you think is responsible for the "Writing data" box. Then unmount the drive.

You could issue a sync and then pull the plug. That should ensure the external filesystem is closed properly.

You could just logout (all jobs you are running should be killed), then back in again. Maybe things look better?

Failing all the above, you could just shutdown: All processes should be killed, so disks can be unmounted cleanly.
I hesitate to recommend shutdown as it's a "windows" ["Did you try rebooting?"] non-solution, but sometimes needs must if time is short and the information that might be lost does not matter.

You might sensibly consider this post for a while, in case someone else has a better idea, and posts it here.

Please let us know what you eventually decided to do, and what happened.

HTH

Someone in another forum suggested I shutdown. So I use the shutdown button in gnome but it closed all programs and froze at the wallpaper. I was still able to ssh so I tried killing process like you suggested, but no luck. Tried sync but it froze. Finally tried shutdown and it turned off. Restarted and it appears all data is there. Unfortunately for some reason I cant seem to access the drive in windows now. Looks like something is corrupted! :( Any suggestions on a fix for that?

So, are you going to tell us?

It's formatted as NTFS. Only the original linux system that crashed can read from it though.

My windows PC also has linux on it and no matter which OS I use the drive makes a weird clicking sound :\ What's also weird is the drive has 2 USB connections, one for data and one for power, but the linux PC only needs the data USB connected to read the drive, while the windows PC needs both connected to attempt to power (can feel the disk spinning but again makes the clicking noise and doesnt read).

This is the drive http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-All-Terr.../dp/B000CR7RW0

Getting information out of you is as easy as squeezing blood from a stone:
Thank you, that's a start.
This is more interesting, and I wish you had mentioned it earlier.

You need to connect both the USB plugs. Both are used for power, one for data.

USB interfaces are limited (part HW, part software AFAIK) as to how much power they are allowed to supply to a device. If your device says it needs both plugged in, then it is very foolish of you only to plug one in even if that appears to work most of the time.

Meanwhile, if linux will read the drive, use linux to make a backup of your data to another device, while you can.

Then, after you have plugged in both cables, I suggest you use windows to repair the NTFS filesystem, because windows should know more about NTFS than linux does (but don't count on it).

Actually according to the manual it should be fine.
I dont know if I can get the windows PC to even work with it at all to repair the FS though. I was trying avoid backing up all these files too but I guess there's no other option.

I somehow am getting the impression that you are trying all this remotely, as from another box? Correct or not?