this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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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.

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[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] ChaosMonkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

yeah many linux systems will run fsck on mount as well if that same thing is detected, it's not a windows specific thing

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

Actually had this occur on a USB NTFS drive I haven't migrated the data to another fs from yet. It mounts at boot so my whole system got hung up until I removed it from the fstab and installed the tools to scan and fix the ntfs filesystem from the aur.

Was like a 20 minute fix, including time to research the tools I needed to fix it.

[–] morriscox@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There can be corrupted files. I run chkdsk from the command prompt to verify.

[–] Dumhuvud@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] morriscox@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

I had a SSD in an enclosure that would do this. When I found the little nub to keep it in place it stopped doing this.