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Masked Man
Asked: 2016-11-02 00:11:42 +0800 CST

Can not safely remove external hard drive?

  • 772

Notice

I could not find the solution but after installing Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS the problem no longer exists!

The Problem

I have a 1TB Transcend external hdd (inner chip is WDC_WD10JPVX-22JC3T0_WD-WX11A15R3AC8) and when I try to safely remove it either from file manager or even from command line with udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdb1 and then udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdb1, it immediately pops up again and won't power off.

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS.

  • It happens either USB2 or USB3.
  • It can safely be removed in either Mac or Windows!
  • I tried 16.04 live and could not safely remove! but my HD can be safely removed in a live 16.04 booted in another PC, and also can be safely removed in my laptop in Windows!

These are some output after running udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdb1 and then udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdb:

  1. udevadm monitor
  2. udisksctl monitor
16.04

3 Answers

  1. I have a cheap WD Black that has the same issue and there is no firmware update available. As I use it as a back-up drive that I only attach 1/week, I stopped worrying about it and unmount all partitions and then just unplug it...

    Has been successful for the last 4 years or so.

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  2. Gnome-disk-utility has "power of this disk" option which I use to power off my external disks safely. Please check the image attached. I'm running Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa

    • 1

  3. I had the same problem with a 1TB external Seagate hdd. Whenever I safely removed it or ejected it, it got unmounted and remounted within seconds.

    The first thing I did was to zero fill the entire hdd with the dd command, because it had some weird partitioning on its own.

    Then I created an MBR (msdos) partition table and a unique primary ntfs partition with parted.

    This solved the problem of the hdd being automatically remounted after being safely removed or ejected. Also, this keeps the hdd from mounting on its own when plugged to the pc/laptop (for some reason I do not understand).

    However, even in the unmounted state, the drive continued spinning. To completely shut it down before removing it from my pc/laptop, I do:

    sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdb

    This works for me.

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