Unable to umount removable media: device busy

[Wayne Sierke]

On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 16:16 -0400, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote: 
> On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 21:58 +0200, Dominique Goncalves wrote:
> > Thanks guys for your answers,
> > 
> > On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 8:18 PM, Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus at marcuscom.com> wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 15:02 +0200, Dominique Goncalves wrote:
> > >> Hi,
> > >>
> > >> I use at home a Gnome desktop on FreeBSD 6.3 (ports last updated
> > >> before the devel/gettext update).
> > >> When I plug my removable HDD (USB Maxtor, 500Go formatted with fat32
> > >> filesystem), it is auto mounted. But I can't umount my HDD, it fails
> > >> with
> > >>
> > >> >> umount: unmout of /media/disk failed: Device busy
> > >>
> > >> I tried from the command line and right clicking the icon on the desktop.
> > >> All applications are closed.
> > >> What can I do to solve this problem?
> > >
> > > As others have said, this may be fam/gamin related.  You could try
> > > running lsof on your volume to see what is actually holding it open.
> > 
> > It is indeed gam_server
> > 
> > %fstat | grep media
> > dom     gam_server  1384  948 /media/disk 1649686560 drwx------   65536  r
> > 
> > How to tell gam_server to leave /media/disk ?
> 
> The only way to do this to restart gam_server.  Though I'm not sure who
> is telling gamin to monitor this drive.

I recently faced a similar issue - unable to unmount either of an
msdosfs ata/hdd partition and an msdosfs usb/flash drive. I was able to
unmount both after closing a nautilus browser window that was open on
the Gnome desktop. I'm not sure why gam_server would still have been
monitoring any files opened on those two mounts but from memory fstat
showed a number of them. No folder from either of the two mounts was
selected in the nautilus browser, although they likely had been earlier.


Wayne