I don’t fucking know why I can’t eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don’t know who’s lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.
Linux has that button and it just causes users to uninstall their desktop environment.
Force close Explorer.exeand you’ll be able to ejectThe USB drives are effectively perma-mounted and the eject command does not work, if even one instance of Explorer is open.
This is Microsoft we’re talking about here. 🤮
Then you stick a usb key in and invariably get the “windroze has detected a problem with the drive, scan or format?”
Do nothing and the drive works perfectly well.
There is a dirty bit indicating the disk was not ejected properly. It stays there until you use the “scan and fix” action. It doesn’t indicate corruption directly.
yeah many linux systems will run fsck on mount as well if that same thing is detected, it’s not a windows specific thing
There can be corrupted files. I run chkdsk from the command prompt to verify.
Not sure why you’re downvoted.
Operating systems often cache disk writes and flush them to underlying devices once in a while. Dismounting (or “ejecting” in Windows terms) forces the writes to be flushed.
See
man 2 fsync.They’re downvoted because the OS prompts it every time. Not only when it’s needed.
It’s like the doctor says you better do a full checkup every time you see them and every time the results are perfectly okay. Sure, maybe one day they’ll be right but it’s not the correct way to do things.
Honestly, i have the same on XFCE. But if i press the button to force eject, i get some dbus-black-magic-that-failed error and jank it out anyway.
just yank it
fuck whoever is using the drive
I used to do this, because it didn’t seem to cause any issues — until it did, and I lost a lot of data.
People who say this I’ll tell you what actually happens so you can know. When you tell it to safely eject all the volatile memory saved in RAM actually write it to the permenant storage memory instead of holding it in volatile storage. Every time you yank you’re betting that its not in volatile storage anymore and was written to storage. That’s what safely eject does, forces the CPU to write to permenant storage.
Edit: the problem comes from whats doing what at what time and you will see why you can lose everything.
Maybe you know why does my microSD card get corrupted any time its pulled unless “ejected”? I need to either “eject” if its on my computer or completely power down the device to keep it from corrupting. Ive tested in both camera and 3dprinter with same result.
Is it just a crap card (its kingston 32 GB)?
From what I learned check to see if the card is set for better performance it makes it write to a cache as consequence but makes it faster on the other hand. I had this problem and this was my answer but other software might be messing with it as well but I always safely eject for good measure anyways.
I simply don’t put data I care about on USB drives any more. They are all basically boot drives or a way to transfer firmware files.
Windows:
Someone else potentially has this file open, would you like to open a read only copy?
Linux:
Someone else potentially has this file open and they may have a newer version than you, would you like to save anyways?
Such a small difference but enough to make Linux superior.
To be relevant to the post:
Windows
Someone is using the drive, you can't ejectLinux
$ umount /mnt unmount failed: device in use $ umount -f /mnt $Windows
mountvol (drive letter) /pJust because you don’t know the command doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
I often get situations where umount -f doesn’t even work :( Especially on a full desktop (not server) where some stuff is probably crawling the drive to make thumbnails or whatever.
The equivalent long option is --fuck-you
I don’t even use that dumb shit. Unless it’s still actively writing something, just take it out.
99% of the time the “other program” is a minimized file browser window open to the drive.
I just unplug it, consequences be dammned.
Windows has that button, but only if you right-click the drive in file explorer and select “eject”. The dialog is very similar, but has the option to continue anyways. That option doesn’t appear when ejecting from the taskbar.
Which is weird, because it means that Microsoft went out of their way to make two different, almost identical dialogs. And they made the better one harder to reach.
Microsoft are giving brilliant at having both a million different equally useless errors and duplicate functionality
Either that or they were added at different times by two different teams with two different design philosophies.
Reminds me of that story about Windows’s format dialog. It’s on Xitter, so here’s the text:
Dave W Plummer
I wrote [Windows’s] Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.
We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI.
I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.
Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.
That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in “temporary” solutions!
I also had to decide how much “cluster slack” would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.
So remember… there are no “temporary” checkins :)
yeah a fresh windows 11 install has like 20 different control panels, all built at different times by different teams using different UI toolkits. It’s basically their philosophy to not unify anything but instead just keep bolting new things to different pieces of the OS, no matter how similar
Might have been at the same time even
It’s definitely that one
Incredible intel. Thanks!
I use AMD, but thank you.
This is why nobody likes computer nerds.
Puns? Puns are why nobody likes nerds? Of all the things to complain about in the world, puns are such an issue for non-nerds?
Weakness, get gud scrubs.
It was joke
Same same
I guess I’m nobody, then. /s
Not 99%. Windows has many usability issues. I’d vote for “dont steal focus and stick windows in front of where I’m typing” and “don’t move things just as I go to click on them” for a start, and also “don’t somehow take an hour to delete 50 files.”
Shift-Del to delete files is usually much faster, though obviously this skips the recycle bin.
Moving files to the recycle bin and deleting files should take the same amount of time, both are essentially just a rewrite of the pointer to the data and don’t copy any data at all.
Not on Windows, it actually moves your files to a special directory.
I take it you don’t filesystem much do you?
Moving a file is literally just changing a pointer in the filesystem table to basically say ‘hey, these file contents are now stored in this other folder’. Moving a file on the same drive literally never requires rewriting the actual file contents.
I’m practically certain that what’s slowing Windows down when sending something to the Recycle Bin is the background processing and data compression being performed by System Restore.
I take it you don’t filesystem much do you?
I take it you don’t Windows much?
Windows moves the file from its current folder to the hidden system folder C:\$Recycle.Bin\. That involves copying file metadata, updating NTFS records, and possibly moving the file across volumes (which becomes a full file copy+delete).
Large files or folders with many entries take longer because NTFS has to record each move, update security descriptors, and maintain the Recycle Bin’s index.
If the file is on another drive than the C-drive, the system literally copies it into that drive’s recycle bin folder, then deletes the original.
Nobody said Windows did this stuff efficiently.
I’m practically certain that what’s slowing Windows down when sending something to the Recycle Bin is the background processing and data compression being performed by System Restore.
Windows doesn’t do any recycle bin data compression. And System Restore is a completely separate, unrelated system. So no it doesn’t do any of that.
I didn’t say the Recycle Bin does any data compression, I said System Restore does data compression, and this is indeed a known fact.
Sure, but neither is relevant to the recycle bin.
“Fun” fact: if you think it’s slow normally (and to be fair, it is), NTFS seems to have a pathological performance regression when a directory contains more than 10,000 children, any operations on files in that directory slow down by around 95%.
I discovered this on our CCTV system at work (that runs on Windows Server 2022), which creates an inordinate number of small files (each containing at most a few seconds of video). It was causing some of its periodic maintenance tasks to fail, as they’d take longer to run than than the configured interval between them.
Windows also really doesn’t like dealing with half-petabyte filesystems, just like… at all.
Have you tried turning off thumbnails? In my experience when it slows down on large directories like that it’s either trying to generate thumbnails or index a bunch of new files (which is also a possibility in your use case)
A great thought on the thumbnails, but the behavior exhibits even when using command-line tools.
Indexing is off for the entire drive, I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of mess that would make if it was on.
I can also tell you that if you are working with file numbers in the 10,000, windows will notoriously interfere with their built-in services. When copying or moving, msdefender might delay every file copy because it marks the action as suspicious and begins scanning the files beforehand. And also the trkwrks or however that drive observation service is called may block actions on specific files just because.
In short, you are not only fighting drive formats at that point, you are also fighting your built-in system services. Source: I wanna die.
And yet they use that fs for their little winsxs trick with 10’000’s of child dirs.
NewTechnology File SystemIt’s new compared to FAT!
(of 1995)
Deleting files was an amazing one already. Then I recently discovered the joy of deleting 30k emails from Outlook… T-T
I literally cannot understand how Outlook is so awful and unpleasant to use. Constant pauses, regular freezes and a search that will show a document I sent to myself five years ago regardless of search terms but won’t surface the perfect match I received yesterday, in the world’s most prominent email client.
The only worse software I have to interact with on a daily basis is Adobe’s PDF reader, which gives me five popups within one minute of opening it and takes over a minute to do a text search in a five page document.
I literally cannot understand how Outlook is so awful and unpleasant to use.
Years of hü and hott between different teams, with different goals, not knowing what the other teams did.
I typically use my browser for PDFs. Firefox actually has some basic PDF edit functionality now.
I copied 400GB of assorted files in an RDP session today and Windows had to think for a minute or two, then copy them ever so slowly, then stop at 99% done, then crash Explorer and disable the start menu and taskbar and CTRL-ALT-DEL and all ways of getting to the Task Manager, and then freeze the whole machine so that I had to travel to the physical machine and hold down the power button, since when it has been unusably slow because Windows now wants to rebuild the RAID array, which takes days. This was a pretty average Windows session.
Try Robocopy. It’s built-in and allows using multiple threads.
That thinking is so very annoying. This is all time that could be used to copy files.
The best bit is that if you lose patience and cancel, the “Cancelling…” takes even longer than finishing the job would have done. I really have no idea what’s going on. Journalling file systems in Linux don’t have to do this.
lol still? Since at least like Win 7 or XP
Dropbox is lying.
Windows may be lying too, but the only thing certain is that dropbox is lying.
I haven’t come across a single program that tells you what is blocking the ejection even in Linux. Sure, if you use the right tools you can find the culprit, but the program that does the ejection task seems to love being vague.
