[Techtalk] Re: Can't umount floppy (2nd post)

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Fri, 18 Apr 2003 03:33 pm, Berenice wrote:
> First: My apologies for the double-posting.  I hit the return key
> after filling in the subject line, and next thing I knew, the
> techtalk digest I wanted to reply to had been sent.  So please ignore
> it.
>
> > You can check this for sure with (as root)
> > # lsof | grep floppy
> >
> >lsof lists all open files.
>
> Suppose I want to close those files instead of turning off the
> computer to umount the floppy.  How do I do that?

I should have been clearer.  The point of the 'lsof' command in this situation 
is that you can see which processes still have files open on the floppy.  If 
it is a bash process, there is probably a forgotten XTerm or a linux console 
running with its working directory on the floppy.  Or it could be OpenOffice 
or whatever.  You then go and find the said process and close it, or if 
desperate, send the offending the process the -TERM signal, or failing that 
the -KILL signal.

A subsequent lsof should then show that there are no longer any files open on 
the floppy, and you can unmount it.

> >I sometimes get the "can't unmount - device is busy" message when I
> >try to umount my floppy. I didn't know what to do when this happened
> >the other day, so I ejected the disk and discovered today I'd lost
> >everything on it.  Luckily I have a copy of the files on the hard
> >drive.
>
> The strange thing is, the next day I mounted a floppy in order to
> copy some documents to it.  I did "ls" to see if the disk was blank
> and I got a message that nautilus was searching my trash directory to
> restore the files I thought I'd lost the day before.  So I got the
> files back on floppy (read-only though), but why only now?  I did
> mount/umount and ls a few times after I found my floppy files were
> gone.  How come nautilus didn't do anything then?

I don't use nautilus, and I have no idea about this one.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 

Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia.  UTC + 10.