Crashing after umounting unavailable filesystems

[William Denton]

On 10 November 2005, Michael C. Shultz wrote:

>> Opps, I crashed the machine. When I moved it, I unplugged the
>> USB DVD-RW and I had mounted one of the dist discs on there.
>> When I did a umount it paniced. My bad.

That happened to me the other day too.  I'd mounted a USB flash drive, 
unplugged the USB hub, replugged it, remounted the drive, and then of 
course I couldn't umount the first mount.  I did a umount -f and the 
machine crashed instantly.

Is this the sort of thing that's really hard to handle, or might it be 
safer one day?  I don't know how serious it is to do bad things to mounted 
file systems, but I'm curious.

Bill
-- 
William Denton : Toronto, Canada : www.miskatonic.org : www.frbr.org