785
99% of Windows usability issues would be fixed if Windows had the guts to add this button
(media.piefed.social)
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.
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
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 usemount) 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).So a complicated set of terminal commands and alternatives you need to have memorized ahead of time. That's definitely the linux solution. You can do it, but no average user would ever be able to when they need it.
Windows probably has some equally complicated way of finding what is locking a file/folder... or you can just install File Locksmith which is a Microsoft PowerToys tool, and just have it in the context menu everywhere.
You can also just pull the USB drive out, if you have waited a reasonable time after last writing to it, no harm will be done.
Also, terminal commands have the advantage that they are the same over the course of 20something years and across all desktop environments, while the tinyfloppy windows moves critical functions around with every second patch so you have to relocate stuff you had just memorized.
And if you're not sure whether the cache has been fully flushed, run
syncand it'll return once it's done!