----- Original Message ---- > From: MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com> > To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> > Sent: Thu, May 20, 2010 7:38:19 PM > Subject: [CentOS] Can't umount flash drive because an application has it locked > > This occasionally happens to me when I've been editing an OOo document that > resides on a flash drive I use with one of my laptops. I've tried > poking around in ps to find out which process has the drive locked, and I > can't figure it out. Nothing directly refers to the flash drive except > one of the hald processes, and it's just scanning the drive (I tried killing > that and it made no difference). My usual sequence of events is as > follows: 1. Plug in the flash drive. 2. Wait for it to appear on the > desktop. 3. Start up a terminal window (which recognizes the flash drive > and runs sudo to allow execute permissions on the drive). 4. Run the > script that unzips the files I want. 5. Open the file with the OO writer, > edit it for a while, then save and close it. 6. Update the zip archive (on > the flash drive). 7. Close the terminal window. 8. Umount the drive, which > fails. I've tried waiting for as much as five minutes, running sync > - nothing. The last three times this happened, I had to shut down > the laptop (which I was going to do anyway) in order to free the > flash drive. This takes several minutes, which can be precious when I > need to bag the laptop in a hurry. There's nothing in any of the > syslogs. The laptop was just updates to the L&G CentOS > 5.5. What am I > missing? Thanks. mhr to me it sounds like the zip program is culprit since it might still holding onto the flash file system. did you try fuser -l on the flash drive and see what has a hold on it. just a thought.