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Quite often when I try to umount a drive (my iPod for instance) it get an error saying it's busy. But it's quite clearly not. There are no applications open that are using it and I'm not in that drive in a shell. Is there a way to see what is keeping that device busy? I get this error with a number of different hard drives. Firewire and USB.
You could try using lsof. I have noticed in the past that some applications such as konqueror appear to stop you unmounting partitions while they are running.
What proccesses are running when you try to unount:
ps -ef
thanks amosf. That fuser app is helpful! It turned out that famd was keeping those drives busy for some reason. So I stopped the server, umounted the drives and restarted the service.
I always get that error message when I had been navigating some (zip, tar...) archive with KDE Konqueror. Apparently Konqueror caches files from that archive.
Also, same error message displays when I'm trying umount /mnt/disk, and my working directory is /mnt/disk.
I'm not sure what's causing problem to you.
It could be some caching thing.
Try browsing root directory of that disk and hit F5 (Refresh).
Do you still get same message?
The Konqueror can (will) block umounts when it is configured to keep one or more instances preloaded. Go to Konq settings, performance, and set instances to keep preloaded to 0.
I too use to have problems unmounting partitions for external USB and Firewire drives, samba partitions and NFS partitions and Floppy's and even CD players for god sakes.
Anyhow, I wrote a little script that fixes it.
The "umount" problems are intermittent so most of the time everything works ok, but for those times when it does not here is my easy solution and it as nothing to do with using fuser or killing obscure processes.
Here is my script:
Code:
#!/bin/bash
# This script is used to stop the xinetd service and restart it
/etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd stop
/etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd start
exit
Save it in you favorite editor as "restart_xinetd" and as root, copy that script in your /USR/BIN directory.
Make sure while still in root to change it's permissions in console like so: chmod +rx restart_xinetd
Now whenever you get the dreaded " Device busy" error while unmounting, just open up a console, login as root (su) and type "restart_xinetd".
You'll be able to unmount anything you want after that and you wont kill any necessary processes or need to reboot.
This is a good workaround until a real fix is found for this bug on many distros.
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