Multiple "Safe to disconnect" messages for usb storage devices

[Jeff Sereno]

When you connect a USB storage device such as external hard-drive or flash key, after unmounting, you usually get a message in the corner of the screen saying to the effect that it is now safe to disconnect the device (GNOME desktop).

Unfortunately if you have a device such as an external USB hard-drive or flash drive that has more than one partition on it, you receive the message for each partition you unmount, ie: if I have three partitions and unmount one of them, I am advised that it is safe to disconnect the USB device even though the other two partitions are still mounted.

If you unmount all three partitions at once, you get three advisories that it is safe to disconnect all stacked on top of each other. It is obvious that the message assumes that you only have one partition on the USB storage device.

Additionally, USB devices are not powered down (or formally disconnected, the way Windows does) upon unmounting (I recognise that unmounting has technically nothing to do with powering down the device, but for what other reason would you unmount it other than to use fdisk?), this means some devices complain that they were not disconnected properly despite unmounting, and some devices such as the Nokia N95 phone will advise the user "data may have been lost" which would panic any novice user. The only time such devices are happy is when the USB stack is shutdown when Ubuntu is shutdown.

Both these issues have been observed on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, that's a known upstream issue, you can read about it on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=500004

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This package has been removed from Ubuntu. Closing all related bugs.