How did you mount the device? I get unmount issues with usb file devices with some regularity. I have closed all file managers, and terminals I've had open with varying success. Generally, logging out of KDE and back in does it for me. Some bug in kfilemanager perhaps? I've never had a command line hang as a result of this though. I have also used ctrl-alt-bspace to kill X entirely, and all it's real and imagined processes. Either of these techniques has always worked for me. It is a bit extreme, if you ask me (even a bit Microsftesque). Still it's better than rebooting, or walking the process tree. Also you might try looking at ps and using the option to display the child/parent relationship, but if the problem is similar to mine this won't help.
Brian Densmore
-----Original Message----- From: Duane Attaway
What do you do when you want to unmount a volume, but its BUSY by some nonexistant process?
I had a USB drive mounted and the drive went into suspend. It doesn't wake up properly with this kernel and unmounting hangs the command line. Syncing hangs too. Unmounting with the -f option tells me umount is also busy?!
I mounted the volume through the command line with the mount command. I found the hanging processes of sync had init as its parent. Not sure why I couldn't kill them. I'm thankful the lsof utility was mentioned as it found a few system libraries tying deleted resources to it, so there may have been a bug in them. Unloading the libraries (init 6!) finally did it. This is what I get for running development kernels and system. Its good to have utilities like lsof to understand why things go bad as it turned my fustration into an enjoyable learning experience.
-=Duane http://dattaway.org
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Brian Densmore -
Duane Attaway