I am so paranoid now about removing USB drives after I accidentally removed one while it was still writing to the drive (which I had no idea because there was no LED on the drive) and it bricked the entire device.
I generally wait until my computer has shutdown completely now before removing any important drives, just to be sure.
I don't even bother to unmount it; what would unmounting add, if the OS can recognize that the device is gone and clean up its mount tables? Is there some filesystem that waits until unmount to recalculate indexes or something?
(Okay, sure, the OS could tell me the disk is in use because I've got an overlay filesystem mounted on top of it, and would I kindly wait forever for that to stop being the case. But screw you, OS, I need this USB. Just send the FUSE server or SMB daemon or whatever a SIGPIPE.)
Also, unmounting helps you to be confident that nothing's started doing more IO since you ran sync.
#!/bin/bash for i in `ls /media/$USER` do cd /media/$USER umount $i done
ls /media/$USER |grep -v cdrom0 |grep -v cdrom> /tmp/disk_status file=/tmp/disk_status if [ ! -s $file ]; then kdialog --passivepopup "Nothing Mounted " 1 else kdialog --passivepopup "Mounted devices: `cat /tmp/disk_status`" 2 fi