Unmounting external USB drives in Ubuntu 9.04
UPDATE root issue discussed below was fixed in Ubuntu 9.10 – unmounting and spinning down the drive works just fine from GUI
As some people know there are problems with correct unplugging of external USB hard drives on linux, Ubuntu in particular. The problem is that none of graphical managers support drive spindown when unmounting/ejecting the external hard drive. This can cause severe damage to HDD.
There’s an old bug in LP for that. The summary is that you can use a script by Clem-Vangelis and Dave Rosky to do the work. Later someone posted a link to scipt by Yan Li, which does even some more stuff.
But since Ubuntu 9.04 those scripts have stopped working – the drive kept spinning. Googling around I found a similar problem and found out the problem was in udev rules. There was a manul solution in comments of LP bug #388506 mentioning udev rules editing: in ubuntu 9.04 I needed to copy the 60-persistent-storage.rules file, modify ACTION!="add|change" to ACTION!="add". This way the scripts worked. Somehow when this rule is present my home partition couldn’t be mounted. So this rules file must be removed after external drive unmount.
To make things easier I merged the scripts by Clem-Vangelis, Dave Rosky and Yan Li, updated it with udev rules workaround and done some other things. The script is as follows:
Ubuntu 8.10 on HP Compaq nx6310
The specs
CPU: Intel CeleronM works out of the box
Chipset: Intel 945GM works out of the box
Video: Intel GMA 950 works out of the box DualHead included (yay! finally)
VGA (D-Sub) / DualHead: DualHead works out of the box. External dispaly on/off (Fn+F4) doesn’t work.
Optical drive: Matushita DVD-RAM UJ-840S works out of the box
Lan: Broadcom BCM4401-B0 works out of the box
WiFi: Broadcom 4311 doesn’t work out of the box. Need’s to fetch a firmware from the Internet
PCMCIA: Texas Instruments ( 8039 ?) not tested
Firewire: Texas Instruments ( 803a?) not tested
USB 2.0: works out of the box
Laptop lid indicator: doesn’t work at all
Ubuntu 8.04 on HP Compaq nx6310
The specs
CPU: Intel CeleronM works out of the box
Chipset: Intel 945GM works out of the box
Video: Intel GMA 950 works out of the box (needs tweaking if you want DualHead)
VGA (D-Sub) / DualHead: external dispaly on/off (Fn+F4) doesn’t work out of the box. Need’s tweaking if you want DualHead. Though, it broke later anyway. External monitor works just fine.
Optical drive: Matushita DVD-RAM UJ-840S works out of the box
Lan: Broadcom BCM4401-B0 works out of the box
WiFi: Broadcom 4311 doesn’t work out of the box; easily configurable
PCMCIA: Texas Instruments ( 8039 ?) not tested
Firewire: Texas Instruments ( 803a?) not tested
USB 2.0: works out of the box
Laptop lid indicator: doesn’t work at all
jhead EXIF editor
I’ve been to a great eurotrip with my friends lately. We got lots of great pictures taken on two digicams. But…
the day after tomorrow…
So what do we have:
LONDON, April 21, 2008 – Canonical Ltd. announced the upcoming availability of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition for free download on Thursday 24 April
…
Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) provides a stable platform for software and hardware vendors, developers and users.
….
It includes the latest, stable version of many core products, and in that spirit is the first distribution to bring Mozilla Firefox 3 (Beta 5) to millions of users.
These just don’t fit. I already see all upcoming articles and rants full of swearing and other negative stuff : (
Just think about it:
- most of us use the PC mainly for web
- we use Firefox™to do that
- why do we use firefox? Riiight, the add-ons (I have 15)
- what happens with the beta?? Righ on! some (or lots of, or only few of them??) add-ons don’t work
- what do we have in the finalé? Right, a (semi)broken web-browser and broken user experience
All the poor users, who’ll click the “Upgrade” button only to find their firefox profile to be broken.
Broken till June? Hell no! the addons would catch up earlier. But then again read this and keep wondering why you can’t see the plugin’s minimal supported version on the new add-ons portal (I didn’t find, only some of them have the info in the comments).
What were they (the ubuntu release team) thinking®?
Here’s a link you might find usefull.
As for me, still comfy with good ‘ol 7.04. And right said, synchronise the releases!
