Have tried several methods to eject/dismount external hdd to no avail

[Univ3rse]

Ok, before anyone becomes frustrated w/me, I have scoured the web and forums for a solution and all seem to be similar but have had the same end result. I am running Ubuntu Maverick. Whenever I attempt to remove my external hdd it is removed from my desktop, but still accessible from the places menu or computer. This is a known bug, but again none of the solutions appear to be working for me. Here are the solutions I have tried and the results:

Solution 1. Selecting "safely remove drive" from drop down menu on desktop or from computer returns this message:
Error detaching: helper exited with exit code 1: Detaching device /dev/sdb
USB device: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-5)
SYNCHRONIZE CACHE: OK
STOP UNIT: FAILED: No such file or directory

Solution 2. using command line: "sudo eject /dev/sdc" returns this message with in the terminal: "eject: unable to find or open device for: `/dev/sdc'"

Solution 3. using command line: "sudo eject /dev/sdb" results in nothing, so I'm assuming this is improper syntax for my version of ubuntu.

Any help w/this would be greatly appreciated. I am a linux noob, so I do realize that perhaps I misunderstood the previous solutions and need to add something specific to my command lines. Thank you for your time.

[Univ3rse]

bump.