Losing what is in the RAM cache would still be data loss and covered by my comment. I have seen USB flash drives get corrupted by unplugging during data access. Even right here on this list. As you say, it would be nice if the CD-ROM drive button (CD-RW drive if a non-writeable media is inserted) would issue unmount and eject the disk. Don't know if anyone is working on this. I do recall a point where the feature was added to GUI filebrowsers and right-click menus to initiate a software eject command. Somebody thought it was important or annoying that we couldn't do that in Linux. Brian Kelsay

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Jonathan Hutchins <> 01/13/05 11:40AM >>> On Thursday 13 January 2005 07:34 am, Brian Kelsay wrote:

In order to streamline the OS, all drives are treated the same. You can't pull a hotswap SCSI or eject a CD until it is unmounted. You definitely don't want to eject a CD-R when you are in the middle of burning, so the burning process locks the drive. If you remove a USB HDD or flash drive without unmounting, you risk data loss or corruption.

This is pretty easy to understand if you do a little bit of work with a floppy, which _can_ be ejected while it's still mounted. <snip> Stick it back in the original machine, unmount it. Watch the blinkenlight. Oooh, that's it, it's writing the data from RAM cache to the disk! _That's_ why you have to unmount drives before you physically disconnect them!