Can't eject external USB hard drive

[Alex Zvoleff]

I have an external USB hard drive with two partitions. One is ReiserFS and one is HFS+ . When I plug in the USB cable, both partitions correctly automount. Under edgy, ejecting one partition ejected both (when ejecting by right clicking on the drive on the desktop and selecting eject). Under feisty, I was until recently able to eject them individually. Now, when I right click and select eject on either volume, I get an error message 'cannot eject volume' and both drives disappear from my desktop, then immediately reappear and open automatically. The only way to eject seems to be via "sudo umount /media/volumename", which does work correctly.

[Alex Zvoleff (azvoleff)]

lsusb

[Sergio Domingo-Hernando (sdomingo78)]

I can confirm this bug. I was able to unmount my usb drive until some days ago (with just one vfat partition), but now I have the same problem: "cannot eject volume".

[David Fokkema (dfokkema)]

Duplicate of #99538?

[ddumanis (dave-davedumanis)]

I can confirm this bug and add to it--I get the exact same behavior with my firewire (1394) external drive. Same error message, "cannot eject volume," and sudo umount does work to eject it as a workaround.

[Egor Margineanu (egor-margineanu)]

Same problem here with USB 2.0 300 GB external disk: 2 partitions: FAT32 and EXT3.

[IkimashoZ (ikimashoz)]

Same problem here with USB 2.0 500 GB external disk: only 1 partition NTFS.

[guyvdb (guyvdb-gmail)]

Same problem here with USB 2.0 200 GB external disk: only 1 partition NTFS.

[João Craveiro (jcraveiro)]

Same problem here with USB 2.0 320 GB external disk: only 1 partition Ext3.

[toobuntu (toobuntu)]

Same problem here with USB 2.0 500 GB external disk: only 1 partition NTFS.

[Brandon Harper (ieatspam)]

I'm also having this problem with an external USB drive-- 250 GB Fat32.

[Rimas Kudelis (rq)]

I too am suffering from this bug. When I try to eject my USB-to-IDE HDD, it disappears from the desktop for a moment, and then comes back with an "unable to eject" error message.
Furthermore, if I run "sudo eject -s /dev/sdb" from commandline, here's what I get:
rq@sugar:~ $ sudo eject -s /dev/sdb
dm_task_set_name: Device /dev/mapper/sda2 not found
dm_task_set_name: Device /dev/mapper/sda5 not found

I don't get it - not only both /dev/mapper/sda2 and /dev/mapper/sda5 exist, they're on a totally different physical disk! Why is `eject` trying to find them at all?

Could it be the case that this is happenning only to partitioned USB media?

[kungmidas (ih82b)]

I used to have this problem, had three partitions: NTFS and two FAT32 (in that order).

The problem disappeared after removing the FAT32 partitions and resizing the NTFS partition to cover the whole drive.

The drive was an Iomega USB 2.0 IDE case, containing a 40 GB IBM drive (GXP shit drive which eventually will fail)