this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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I don't fucking know why I can't eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don't know who's lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.

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[–] tamlyn@lemmy.zip 29 points 2 days ago (40 children)

How is linux handle such situations, i'm new using it and haven't looked that up yet, well i didn't got in such a situation yet, but i only used a handful of time a external hard drive

[–] umbraroze@piefed.social 33 points 2 days ago (26 children)

Basically, if you, as a regular user, cannot unmount a device, you can usually just go to root shell (sudo -i), see where the thing is mounted (just use mount) and then unmount it (umount /media/blah/floop). If it says the device is still busy, as root you can remount it as read-only and then unmount it (seeking documentation left as an exericise to the reader, as I'm sitting at a Windows system now).

There's also lsof ("list open files") tool, which can be used to see which exact programs are using files on that device, which you can then use to kill those sneaky processes (ps, kill).

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 7 points 2 days ago

I don't think an average user is going to know how to interpret the output of mount or findmt

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