[Sussex] external hard drives - much confusion.

[Steven Dobson]

Anthony

On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 22:48 +0000, ar at f2s.com wrote:
> PS is Steve simply saying to take care to unmount automounted or hotpluggable
> devices, or should they be handled in a different way?  TIA.

I am saying that it is prudent to unmount any writable filesystem before
unpluging the device it lives on from the system.  

Before unpluging a USB thumb drive I select the "unmount" from the thumb
drive's icon on the desktop.  This causes the OS to flush any data it
has cached and make sure that the filesystem is in a consistant state.

>From stuff I have read on the Web it is my understanding, although I
have not checked the vfat device driver code personally, that the way
the allocated and free block lists are managed (on the Linux
implmentation at least) it is possible for data to be lost if these
lists are not consistant.

Steve