How can I safely remove my USB hard drive in Fedora 17?

Question

In Fedora 17, when I want to plug my USB hard disk out, I can only unmount it. But the problem is that the hard drive won't be powered off so that I can plug it out.

In some other distros like Ubuntu there is a Safely Remove option which powers the hard drive off.

How can I fix that?

Solution 1

After a lot of web surfing I came across the solution suggested by someone in askubuntu.com. Thank you everybody. I just needed to install udisks package! To power off my hard disk I have to enter the following command in terminal after unmounting all of its partitions:

udisks --detach /dev/sdX

Solution 2

There is no safe removal button for the USB drive. You can eject the USB drive by clicking the small triangle which is on the side of the USB drive.

For ejecting a flash drive follow these steps:

1. First see the USB drive by entering this command:

   fdisk -l
   

2. Assuming your USB drive is /dev/sdb1, eject it with the following command:

   umount /dev/sdb1
   

   Alternatively:

   eject /dev/sdb1 
   

This will allow you to safely remove your USB drive.

Solution 3

Try

eject /dev/sdX

where X is the letter of your device.

Edit

You can find all available drive letters by using fdisk -l.

Solution 4

As of Ubuntu 20.04

udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdb turns off the LED of an external HDD.

Note: regarding eject, it apparently has multiple methods that it tries until one of them "succeeds" (use -v to see what's going on). Nothing really helped:

• eject -v /dev/sdb tried CDROM ejection and reported success, but didn't actually do anything (no LED changes, no dmesg messages)
• eject -v --scsi /dev/sdb (explicitly chosen method) actually succeeded in ejecting, but the drive was detected right back (as evidenced by dmesg)

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Comments

[slhck]

Does hdparm -y /dev/sdX work?

[Mehrdad]

Nope sir. This command removes the drive name from nautilus menu but does not power it off.

[slhck]

Could you explain how to find out what the device letter is? I would assume this can be confused quite easily.

[Mehrdad]

This did not help. I also checked eject's man page in which it is written that this command does the same as umount according to the device in use.

[vonbrand]

eject /media/THE_DISK should also work (if it is mounted there). @Mehrdad, don't believe too much what manuals say. They might be wron (report to bugzilla if so).

[Lorenzo Von Matterhorn]

@Josiah please mention fdisk -l in your answer as the means to check drive letters, or any other mean you find appropriate.

[Matthew Walker]

The "little triangle" can be found under Activities > Files and by locating the USB drive on the left pane. The icon is to the right of the USB drive's label.

[gluk47]

As of ubuntu 15.10, this seems to be udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdb. BTW, as a response, my HDD switched off its light but still emitted noise and vibration until I physically plugged it off.

[Totem]

@gluk47's comment is worked for me on ubuntu 16.04. Though my hard-drive did fully power down.

[gluk47]

If you are not root, you can still get an idea what the drive letter is, using blkid.

[tdwong.star]

On Ubuntu 16.04, sudo eject /dev/sdX1 works for me. To find out which device letter is, use mount | grep /dev/sd