Unmounting external drive takes tremendously long

Asked Jan 27 '16 at 19:54

Active Jan 27 '16 at 19:54

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This morning I copied around 200GB of data to a quite old USB2.0 1TB external drive. The copying took around 2 or 3 hours. Afterwards I unmounted & the unmounting is still going on (after more than 12 hours).

It should not be related to this problem since I only have 4GB of RAM. And I don't think it's related to the The pernicious USB-stick stall problem

I am afraid to interrupt the unmounting process & retry it. Is this a common problem? How should I proceed in order to not corrupt some of the data that I copied onto the external drive. I am running lubuntu 14.04

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Community

asked Jan 27 '16 at 19:54

Fitzroy Hogsflesh

Have a look at iotop, see whether there's still anything writing to the device ... did you spot anything untoward in dmesg? – tink Jan 27 '16 at 20:19
in iotop there is no constant writing going on, just some smaller things that I can't clearly identify popping up every other second. – Fitzroy Hogsflesh Jan 27 '16 at 20:30
in dmesg there was nothing particularly untoward (as far as I can tell as layperson) – Fitzroy Hogsflesh Jan 27 '16 at 20:31
Did you run sync? – David Betz Jan 27 '16 at 23:21
I did after you wrote it, thank you. But no apparent influence as far as I could see... – Fitzroy Hogsflesh Jan 29 '16 at 05:29
I'm having the same problem just now. Also no notable write activity in iotop. Weird. – Stefan Reich Aug 12 '20 at 12:19
I finally just unplugged the drive, and it apparently didn't cause a problem. Diffed the whole file, and it's ok. This is on Peppermint Linux 10. – Stefan Reich Aug 12 '20 at 12:44

Unmounting external drive takes tremendously long

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