I have KINGSTON USB (handy Drive) which is working fine under Windows XP and Red Hat Linux 9 (Same laptop, with dual boot). Problem is that, under Windows XP, when I click ‘Safely remove..’ then light(physical LED) of USB drive become off, insuring that everything is going fine and drive is off.
But under Red Hat Linux 9, when I give command,
Then no doubt, the drive is unmounted, but there is still light glowing inside USB drive, and I am afraid that in such case I will damage my USB drive, if I remove. Please advice me, what to do, any command to switch the light off of USB drive, before removing?

the light will be on because the kernal still sees the device.
as long as you did umount the partition isn't active and no damage to data will occur.

shouldn't your command be
umount /mnt/usbdrive
(or where ever you are mounting it to?)

I was actually going to post a similar post. However when I umount the device and remove it and then try to get it back up it fails. The light will not come back on until I reboot the system. I would imagine there is a way to shutdown the device for safe removal (aka turning the light off). I have only tried this once but resetting the system everytime I remove it us unnacceptable. Has anybody done this and been able to remount the device later? By the way I am using RH 9.

- Zych