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.
I’m not too versed in the intricacies of Windows, but I don’t think that’s the case on Linux at least.
There’s a difference between telling the processes to “fuck off” (by using
umount -f) and actually yanking the drive.umount -fwill at least flush the caches to drive, including all filesystem metadata and journaling, while just yanking the drive off will definitely not, and if you’re unlucky you can ruin the FS (especially if it’s not a journaling one). I’ve lost data like that before, been usingumount -fever since.OP has done the same. A file is in use/locked by an app even after the have issued an unmount/eject command. The file that’s in use may not survive.
Yes, but at least the rest of the filesystem will