Debian Configuration :: Safely Removing Mounted USB Device
Jan 7, 2011
I'm not sure if this is a bug in Squeeze beta 2 or if it's something I've overlooked. I have a Maxtor 250 GB external USB drive that I use for backups. It gets auto-mounted fine, always in the same place, and from my normal user account I can write to it, even delete directories on it if I want to. But when, from Gnome, I select the "Safely remove" option, I get an error to the effect that it can't stop the device. The weird thing is that the thing actually *is* unmounted. I've checked the mount point and it's no longer there.Is there some package I maybe should've installed but haven't? I'm not really worried about data loss, since I'm sure the drive wouldn't unmount unless it was properly synched; it's just the error message that bugs me.
I have a nightly scheduled script which creates a $vhostname directory under /mnt, mounts a windows box pointing to /mnt/$vhostname then rsyncs (pulls) some files/folders from the mount point. After this, I want to unmount the drive and remove the /mnt/$vhostname directory. Problem is that removing the /mnt/$vhostname directory sometimes ends up deleting all the files on the source! Example of script (stripped out lots of superfluous stuff):
It seems that my umount line isn't disconnecting the mount, leaving the following line to literally delete all directories, recursively. Is there a way of safely just deleting the directory (ie: mount link) without linux accidentally trashing the whole source?
I've just installed Squeeze with KDE. I was wondering what is the best way to remove some unwanted apps without breaking everything (I want to get rid of Kopete and a few other apps like Dragon Player as I don't use them)? I tried to: apt-get remove kopete but it said it wanted to remove a whole bunch of other stuff as well. (I'm a recent Fedora convert).
Debian if I suspend the PC, will the external mounted harddisk safely umount automatically? I want to make sure that the integrity of my external HDD is not compromised while the PC goes in the suspend mode.
These should be my last pleas for help with regard to Fedora 13. I've been unable to turn off the notifications that appear in the top right corner, despite a decent amount of searching on google. I can't remove any notifications package without removing a bunch of important software along with it. Also, F13 refuses to "Safely Remove" either of my external disks. I have to yank out the usb cord, touching wood each time.
Have been working most of the day on this usb full install (Jesiie xfce) trying to make it leaner/faster and trying to get rid of minor annoyances like "watchdog: watchdog0 is not shutting down" (couldn't btw), finally managed to disable "You have mail" by commenting out "session optional pam_ mail.so standard" in /etc/pam.d/login. Every little change registers in terms of seconds of boot time saved and how the system responds because, well, i'm booting from a usb 2 drive.Followed some suggestions from "Reduce Debian", removed cups-common, some foreign language locales and man pages. what i can safely do with systemctl.
I have a 32-bit laptop running a dual boot with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.09 LTS.I've decided that Ubuntu just isn't for me, and I want to remove the partition and restore the extra hard drive space back to Windows 7.
Now, a few months ago, I accidentally deleted my Ubuntu partition through Windows Disk Management, and I ended up not being able to boot up my computer. I can't remember what the exact cause was, but I think it was a problem with the GRUB, and I think I fixed it by reinstalling Ubuntu. Does anyone know how I can safely remove the Ubuntu partition without having to go through all this again?
Cannot safely remove Western Digital 2TB ext hdd. When I right click on drive to unmount, it says: "Unable to stop drive, This file cannot be stopped" Anyone know how to unmount, maybe using the terminal??
I've been using Gnome for several years and haven't had any real problems with it. Now, however, I find the descriptions of what Gnome 3 and the Gnome Shell quite unsettling. That is, the Gnome devs have added a number of things I don't want, removed things I do want and made it impossible to configure Gnome 3 to work anywhere near what I want without adding unsupported third-party extensions. (Note: this is neither a complaint nor a flame; it's just a statement of my personal taste and any attempts to argue about it will be ignored.)
Currently, I have installed XFCE and am very happy with it on my two F14 boxes. I know that if and when I move to F15 (or F16 if 15 continues to be as problematic as it is so far) the upgrade will include Gnome 3, even though I don't use it. I'd like, therefore, to remove it but without removing any bits and pieces of it that are needed by whatever programs I'm using. What's the safest way to do this?
Let's assume I have a volume group (VG) with six physical volumens (PV) - sdb1, sdb2, sdb3, sdc1, sdc2, sdc3..I want to remove one of the PVs from the group in order to use its space elsewhere - how can I know if it's safe? How can I do that without losing data and without first "pvmove"ing it elsewhere?Reading a bit more, my guess is using the result of pvscan, but I thought I'd ask before removing keeping it safe as I'm not an LVM expert.
Hoping for some verification before I proceed.An alt kernel was installed side by side with the current mainstream kernel during an experimental NIC driver install. Unfortunately, since the experiment failed I would now like to remove all traces of the alt kernel since it was given a version ahead of the current main version and I would like to avoid all possibilities of contention should a future kernel upgrade use the experimental alt kernel's version number.
Failure to safely remove the USB with the following techniques: 1) umount /dev/sdd and I get the error "umount: /dev/sdd is not mounted (according to mtab)" 2) dolphin > right click the drive icon > safely remove: I get the error message "org.desktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure: Cannot open /media/.hal-mtab" 3) konqueror: sys:/info > click the drive eject button (nothing happens) 4) device notifier > click the drive eject button : I get a ERROR in Plasma Workspace that says "Could not unmount the device. One or more files on the device are open within an application" ... NOTE: this will happen on a fresh reboot with the folders of the USB never accessed, much less files being open on it.I have also noticed something similar when dealing with cds/dvds.... seems like I can only eject on a reboot.
I would like to resize the /home partition but it is mounted and when umount is run, it errors with 'busy'.
System Configuration:
I installed jessie on a laptop with one SSD. I used guided partitioning and selected the whole drive with multiple partitions. The /home now takes up 420 GB. I would like to reduce that to 20 GB to make room for another partition.
How to run a fsck on a mounted drive? I attempted unmount and it said no. I suddenly got an error 4 and trying to run a check, and it aborts with can't cause mounted.
I have had this problem repeatedly with aptitude recently. I run Debian Squeeze but in a somewhat unusual fashion - I create a custom live image using the builder on the Debian Live website and then run the live image in persistent mode off a flash drive. For all intents and purposes this has never behaved any differently from a standard Debian install and has given me a great deal of flexibility and power, for which I'm grateful.
However there's been one strange phenomenon that keeps occurring. After a certain point - not before - aptitude stops removing dependencies when I remove packages, though in the ncurses interface the option is shown as switched on (and my .aptitude/config file does not switch it off, nor does any other configuration file that I can find, though maybe I'm missing something). This occurs even in the case of dependencies which I know cannot be depended upon by any other package. e.g. the e17 package in unstable brings in libecore, libevas etc. which are depended on only by e17 as I have no other Enlightenment packages installed. But removing e17 removes only the e17 package and not the dependencies.
The other odd thing is that this does not occur at first. Aptitude works fine for a while on a clean system. At some point though it simply changes in behaviour.
I have two partitions in LVM. They are added in /etc/fstab to mount automatically. But, they are not working. The process to mount partitions seems to be happening before the service /etc/init.d/lvm2 is started. I can get it mounted using "mount -a" command, but not during the boot time. What should I do get it automatically mounted on every boot?
In an attempt to minimize my system when I mark for removal libcups2 using synaptic it asks to install 7 not authenticated packages, however if I choose mark for complete removal it asks to install the same 7 packages and remove every single installed package from epiphany to gimp to zenmap. Any ideas as to whats going on with that?
I have a fresh Debian install, since this install was on a desktop, I had an internet connection and didn't notice (it was late, I was half asleep) I opted to download a whole load of packages I didn't really need. I thought all was doomed until I remembered that I have done another Debian install but a week ago on a laptop, which has a nice clean install without all the bloat.
So I ran dpkg --get-selections > selections and had it sent to my new desktop installation.
Now if I run dpkg --set-selections < selections followed by dselect-upgrade nothing happens. I assume this is because the smaller list contains all the packages 'to be installed' which already are, and all the missing packages are not being purged. Do I need to explicitly add all the packages I want to purge to the 'selection' list or is there a better way of doing it?
I am an old Debian user, ho just reinstalled it again to see how it evolved since my las version (3.2). I am sharing it with Arch Linux, And decided to let bot of them. I am using GDM compiled and configured in Arch, and removed GDM2 from Debian (i just like the easy menu.list from the old GDM). The problem is that when i update the kernel, it didn't fing GDM and drops an error message. I tried removing the distro-preconfigured Kernels, as i compiled my own 3.0.0-rc2 Kerenel, but i cant delete the previous ones. Now everytime i do an install or uptgrade, apt-get drops wastes some time, and drops an error message:
[code]...
What can i do? i googled some similar errors, but where just messed up mirror.lists, or similar, i know it isnt the cause of fail.
My primary repos are DVD .isos on my hard drive loop-mounted in /etc/fstab. Although I can install packages just fine and there are no issues with running installed applications, I must have screwed up the configuration of /etc/apt/sources.list because I get this output when I do apt-get update:
Here is my rather primitive but functional /etc/apt/sources.list:
Code: Select all# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 8.2.0 _Jessie_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 20150906-11:13]/ jessie contrib main # deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 8.2.0 _Jessie_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 20150906-11:13]/ jessie contrib main deb file:/dvd1 jessie main contrib deb file:/dvd2 jessie main contrib deb file:/dvd3 jessie main contrib
After doing this I rebooted my server (a few days later). After rebooting I had no ipv4. I tried statically assigning IP addresses to no avail. Ran ifconfig eth0 down/up which got me nowhere. Eventually decided to ask "Okay, what changed". Started installing packages that were autoremoved. Had to install from the apt cache using dpkg. First one I tried was sendmail-base. Then did ifconfig eth0 down/up, which gave me networking back.
I have checked the dependencies for sendmail-base and I see nothing that would relate to networking, so I'm really confused on why this happened. I had backups of the server so I went a week back and noticed sendmail-base was installed at that time. So I went a day back, where sendmail-base wasn't installed, and installed it. Sure enough it brought back networking. I'm just stating this because it is more proof that sendmail-base was the missing component.
I've got an 8-disk raid-5 setup, and one of the disks failed. I shut the system down, replaced it, and powered the box back on again. Then, I made a catastrophic mistake; I 'failed' and removed the wrong disk (should have been sdj1, and I typed sdk1 by accident). I tried to re-add sdk1 back to the raid array, but it got listed as 'spare'. My raid array is off-line, since I now have 2 disks unavailable.
I know that the data still exists on sdk1, is there any way I can get the raid array to recognise the fact that it's a valid part of the array, and not a spare disk? At least if I can do that, I'll have a degraded but accessible array, and then I can rebuild the array on the properly replaced disk.
I'm currently dual-booting Squeeze & Windows XP on a machine i use frequently.
In my experience on the desktop, i now see no reason to have Windows XP as a boot option, & wanted to try & avoid a full re-installation of Debian in order to remove XP (merging it's partition with / ).
I have a checklist that i put together, but wanted to be sure this was all correct before going forward.
1. Perform full back-up of all data.
2. Boot into Debian, through GUI -
System Tools > Disk Utility
- Select HDD (80GB Hard Disk) - Select windows partition ( /dev/sda1 ) - Format /dev/sda1 to Ext4 Filsystem
3. Boot Live CD
- Use gParted to extend /dev/sda2 (was 38GB, will extend to 78GB)
4. Remove XP from the boot menu.
( Note: My ~ folder is on the same physical drive as / (same volume), but i actually store all Media on a separate physical drive which is formatted in NTFS. I plan on reinstalling XP using a virtual hard disk, & sharing that with the virtual machine.Here is a screenshot of my Disk Utility - [URL]
When I plug in my external USB Hard drive which is formatted as a single NTFS partition, it is recognized and mounted automatically, a nautilus window pops open. Unfortunately it is not writable. The reason is: the partition is mounted "ntfs" (which lacks write support) instead of "ntfs-3g". This is the output of mount after plugging in the drive:
$ mount | grep sdc1 /dev/sdc1 on /media/4EBC5FB82435B0EE type ntfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=devkit,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=0077)
I want this partition to be writable by just plugging it in.
The partition should not have any errors because a) I fsck'ed it windows and b) mounting it manually works:
$ sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/disk_/ $ mount | grep sdc1 /dev/sdc1 on /media/disk_ type fuseblk (rw,allow_other,blksize=4096) $ devkit-disks --mount-fstype ntfs-3g --mount /dev/sdc1 Mounted /org/freedesktop/DeviceKit/Disks/devices/sdc1 at /media/4EBC5FB82435B0EE $ mount | grep sdc1 /dev/sdc1 on /media/4EBC5FB82435B0EE type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) $ gnome-mount -nbtd /dev/sdc1 $ mount | grep sdc1 /dev/sdc1 on /media/disk type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
How can I get ntfs drives to be mounted as writable by default, preferrably without having to modify fstab?
I have a Debian testing system on a laptop that used to have Windows 8 on it. I kept the EFI boatloader and its partition, but now every time the system boots, it first tries to boot into Windows (which isn't there anymore). Removing /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft just leads to an error message when booting, with some component of Windows still trying to load and not finding those files.
The workaround for now is to go into the UEFI boot menu on every boot and selecting the "debian" entry, which works but is a bit cumbersome.How can I get rid of the Microsoft loader completely? I find a lot about repairing or re-adding the Windows bootloader, but nothing about removing it.
I'm building a Debian Live system, [URL], and I've pared it down to a very light distro. It is using the IceWM, has the basic linux commands, and very very little else.
When I run "top" and "ps aux", I see that I have multiple terminals and logins waiting to be used. It's a small amount, but I'd like to make that RAM usable elsewhere. The indicated commands are: "/bin/login -f" and "-bash", and I have one of each associated with each tty[1-7]. I may want to keep tty1 and tty2, just in case, but I can't imagine wanting 3-7.
So, what I'm looking for is a way to stop tty[3-7] from even starting in the first place.
I saw on one forum the suggestion of modifying the /etc/init/tty[1-7].conf files, but these files aren't present, I presume because it's a "Live" system.
Debian Version: 8.3 (Jessie) KDE (although this is NOT a desktop issue) Basic Hardware: Gigabyte Motherboard GA-970A-D3P AMD 8350 CPU (8 cores) 32 GB DDR3 RAM 120GB SSD SATA-6GB/s 750 WD Black SATA-6GB/s
I am getting "Error: No space left on device" regularly during updates or installs, but why. Here is data on the disks, filesystems, etc...
Seems very doubtful that inodes are the killer.I have googled and followed all the threads, and search these forums and found nothing that fits - every answer there was focused on avaiolable space and inodes..And to make the cheese even more binding, the issue has cropped up on another 8.3 system with far more disk space (larger hard drives) and lots more unused inodes
I've been testing Squeeze to determine whether KDE4 is finally suitable for my primary machine. Everything seems to be working fine except for detection of IDE devices. My CD/DVD drive no longer automounts and the reason seems to be that no device is being created. My Lenny system detects the drive as /dev/hda, but no such device exists in Squeeze. During boot, Squeeze appears to detect the drive as /dev/sr0 (according to dmesg), but in fact that device does not exist either.I'm actually running the Lenny kernel, as I am unable to compile my Ralink wireless driver (rt2860sta) using the Squeeze kernel. Also, for inquiring minds, I use removable HDD drive bays on my systems to simplify testing.
I run a program (findknxusb) to scan for devices on USB, but the device is not found.
The debugging level for libusb is on: $ ./findknxusb Possible addresses for KNX USB devices: libusb_set_debug... libusb: setting debugging level to 1 (on) libusb_init...
I installed Debian Lenny on my HP Laptop - dv6-2120ed. Because i have atheros wireless card i needed to install ath9k which is not supported in 2.6.26 kernel so i compiled it to 2.6.32. Everything is good, but when i boot the new kernel i get "Bar 6: No parent found of for device" for 2 devices - the ethernet LAN card and the sound card. After 1 minute waiting the kernel starts booting and everything works fine (the LAN and the SOUND card too). How can i fix this and what means it exactly?
