Description of problem: Usb drive icon will disapear before the system has finished writing to the drive. As a user, I feel that it is now safe to remove the drive. Doing so before the write is finished leads to corrupted data or destroyed file system. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): usbview-1.0-13 2.6.17-1.2141_FC4 How reproducible: Every time I tried to different results. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Stick in USB stick and wait for icon. 2. Copy or write a large amount of data to the USB drive. Drag/Drop or cp. 3. Unmount drive by right clicking on the desktop icon. 4. Wait for the icon to disappear from the desktop. 5. Pull the drive out. Actual results: The first time this happened, the FAT was trashed on a VFAT formatted drive. To the point that Linux couldn't mount the drive again. I had to run dosfsck to fix it. I then had to copy the data back to the drive and I was monitoring /var/log/messages and nothing showed up for the drive until I removed the drive. df -h showed normal date for the drive while mounted but when I unmounted the drive and the icon was gone, I still had a listing in df -h for /dev/sda but was not showing the data for /dev/sda but the first partition listed above it, /dev/hda2 Expected results: The drive icon to remain on the desktop until all files are written, cache's flushed and system has finished with the drive. Additional info: First mount Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: SCSI device sda: 2048001 512-byte hdwr sectors (1049 MB) Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: sda: Write Protect is off Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: SCSI device sda: 2048001 512-byte hdwr sectors (1049 MB) Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: sda: Write Protect is off Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: sda: Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda Jul 11 14:13:47 eagle1 fstab-sync[28531]: added mount point /media/usbdisk for /dev/sda Jul 11 14:13:47 eagle1 kernel: SELinux: initialized (dev sda, type vfat), uses genfs_contexts After writing the data, I remounted the drive to check. Jul 11 14:26:21 eagle1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 146696 Jul 11 14:26:22 eagle1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 146936 Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: sda: Jul 11 14:13:46 eagle1 kernel: sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda Jul 11 14:13:47 eagle1 fstab-sync[28531]: added mount point /media/usbdisk for /dev/sda Jul 11 14:13:47 eagle1 kernel: SELinux: initialized (dev sda, type vfat), uses genfs_contexts Jul 11 14:26:21 eagle1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 146696 Jul 11 14:26:22 eagle1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 146936 Jul 11 14:26:22 eagle1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 581560 Jul 11 14:26:22 eagle1 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on sda Jul 11 14:26:22 eagle1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 581561 Jul 11 14:26:22 eagle1 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on sda Jul 11 14:26:22 eagle1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 581: Which continues. After fixing the drive with dosfsck, I had tried again. And again. If there is no indicator lights on your usb stick, then there is nothing other than the desktop to indicate that drive is still active. On three attempts, I lost data on all three occasions. I found that if I waited for "df" to quit displaying the drive, then the write was finished. A bug has been submitted for FC5. 194296 I have done this on two different systems and two different sticks. On one stick with a light, the light was still flashing when the icon disappeared.
This report targets the FC3 or FC4 products, which have now been EOL'd. Could you please check that it still applies to a current Fedora release, and either update the target product or close it ? Thanks.
Just updated to FC6 on one machine and this is fixed. I agree that FC4 is at end of life so this is a won't fix.