If you’ve upgraded your Ubuntu system to 11.10, or have a fresh install, you might find that when you right-click a USB drive and choose “Safely Remove Drive” in the left pane in Nautilus, the system hangs. This appears to affect some users of the Linux kernel 3.0.0-12, which at this early stage would be what most users have, so if this applies to you, it should be easy enough to fix.
Go to http://people.canonical.com/~ogasawara/lp844957/ and into the folder for your architecture (i386 or amd64). Install the 3 .debs located therein (I did so with GDebi, but should be the same in Ubuntu Software Centre, just slower), and reboot. You should now be able to successfully remove the drive without issue the next time you connect it.
NOTE: What you’re actually doing here is replacing the 3 main kernel packages, but for me and a bunch of others affected, there were no issues, with kernel 3.0.0-13 replacing the old one in GRUB, booting into Ubuntu just fine, and resolving the freezing issue when trying to remove USB drives.
Do not use this if your kernel is a later version (i.e. higher than 3.0.0-13). It probably wouldn’t kill your system, but reverting to an earlier kernel is extreme measures, so try find a more current and applicable solution (this fix appeared within days, so it does pay to spend a few minutes looking around the web, especially the Ubuntu Forums).
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This sounds like a very annoying bug, but the updates released soon should fix this. The Ubuntu desktop has faced quite a backlash from some users due to the new Unity desktop interface, so this on top of that would be very annoying.
Yes, the next kernel should fix the problem. As for Unity, well it can only get better, and many already love it. And when you look at Gnome 3 – Shell or Classic – it’s not like Ubuntu could continue to use Gnome 2.x. I’ve seen people posting in forums how they’ve ditched one distro running Gnome Shell for another still running the old Gnome, but sooner or later (and I’m betting sooner) all will use Gnome 3. And Gnome Shell is just as wacky as Unity, and Classic is not as it used to be, with much of the customisability missing.
I think this bug has something to do with the serious USB IO problem ALL linux kernels are suffering since 2.6.25 at least…
Or “How to crash any linux >2.6.25”:
Put a USB flash drive / USB cdrom / USB … whatever and copy some content from/to device. If you remove the device while it is doing IO ==> KERNEL CRASH.
This is a kernel bug which happens to all distributions.
In bug tracker you find 7 bug reports caused by this issue (some of them several months old) but nobody cares.
Well, I only had it happen with the 3.x kernel in Ubuntu 11.10, so condolences if you’ve had this happening for quite a while now. Though if it is because of removing devices while I/O is still going on, that might have something to do with it, hehe. Far more of a worry than a crash is corrupting data, and with flash devices killing the actual hardware, so I totally never recommend doing that anyway! So, removing drives still being accessed may be asking for trouble, but this freezing while trying to remove the drive the proper way was a worry (but was at least really easily rectified).
USB problem is still ongoing. I can not copy to usb, It freeze at 98 or 99 %. Same thing with send-to usb. Something is really wrong with 11.10.
Wow, wish I had some info to offer there! I just had the unmounting problem, but yours definitely is more of an issue. Hope an update sorts it out for you.
Forgot to say : kernel 3.0.0-13 generic gnome 3.2.1
Hey there. I was considering adding a website link back to your website since both of
our web sites are based around the same topic. Would you prefer I link to you using your website address:
https://ubuntugenius.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/ubuntu-11-10-fix-safely-removing-usb-drive-causes-system-freezekernel-panic-in-kernel-3-0-0-12/ or web site title:
Ubuntu 11.10 Fix: Safely Removing USB Drive Causes System Freeze/Kernel Panic (in Kernel 3.
0.0-12) Ubuntu Genius’s Blog. Please make sure to let me know at your earliest convenience. Thanks
Yeah, no worries, I get “pingbacks” all the time. I think what happens is that when you post one of my links, I get a pingback approval request, which I then approve. Cheers.