Unmounting a partition on a USB device displays "Safe to remove" even if other partitions are still mounted.

[James Lewis]

When using a USB stick, or hard drive with more than one partition (such as a music player with SD card) clicking on the "eject" button for any partition regularly shows the "device is safe to remove" message even though some partitions are still mounted.

Should check that ALL partitions are unmounted before displaying message that the device is safe to remove.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?
 * What ubuntu version do you use?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

It would be reproduceable, but at the moment it seems to have decided never to say that a device is safe to remove... this is also related to another bug about that message being inconsistant.

I'm running 9.04, and 9.04UNR and I believe I have seen it on both... I'll have another go at reproducing it tonight and hopefully make a video to show what happens.

The steps to reproduce would be to have a USB stick with 2 or more partitions on it, plug it in, use it for a while then unmount one partition... at this point a message will be displayed that says "The device XXXX is now safe to remove"... clearly this is inaccurate since 2 partitions on that device are still mounted.

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

OK, finally managed to capture a screenshot of this situation... and I've also learned how to reproduce it. I also have a hypothesis regarding why it happens.

A good test case is my Cowon D2 audio player, probably quite common in the Linux world as it plays OGG and Theora, but one can see how this situation may occur in many devices and also normal USB pendrives with multiple partitions.

Firstly, the "Safe to remove" message only appears if there was cache to flush to the device, so it's hard to replicate, I believe there is a different bug suggesting that this should be made more consistent.

If you request a filesystem to be unmounted, and it has somthing to flush, then when the unmount is complete, the message pops up. It looks at the hardware device name and says that this entire device is safe to remove, but if the device has more than one partition, that may not be true.

I am attaching a screenshot of the Cowon, which has one filesystem labeled "D2", and another labeled "16GB_SD2" which is the SD card in the Cowon's card slot. You can see that unmounting the SD card triggers a message that the entire device is safe to remove, despite the fact that another filesystem on that device is still mounted.

This was observed on UNR 9.04 on the date shown in the image, but I have also seen it on desktop Ubuntu over a period of time.

[Vish (vish)]

I'm leaving the papercut task as incomplete as this seems as something that is trivially fixable. Unless someone says its simple :)

[Vish (vish)]

^typo:
I'm leaving the papercut task as incomplete as this seems as something that is *NOT* trivially fixable.

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

It appears to me that this is resolved in 9.10, although a bit roughly by always unmounting all partitions on a device if any are unmounted.

[Chris Wilson (notgary-deactivatedaccount)]

I am invalidating this as a paper cut since this is just a bug that needs fixed, rather than a minor design flaw.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

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