I can not unmount drives in Ubuntu.. Any Help?

[ash235]

Whenever i try to unmount the hard disk partitions or drives from Ubuntu, it says " Cannot unmount volume-You are not privileged to unmount the volume 'Media' unmount: only root can unmount"
Even when I login as root with sudo -i it says all the same stuff..
What am I doing wrong if at all??
i even tried giving my account root previlages In the user acc and settings, but it is still not working.. What else do I need to do?

[knattlhuber]

Have you tried

sudo umount /media/drivename

where drivename can be found in the output of

cat /etc/mtab

[-kg-]

I am having exactly the same problem. Here is further information:

When trying to unmount volumes from the desktop, I have come up with the following information:

Cannot unmount volume

You are not privileged to unmount the volume "{Name of Volume}"

Details
{mntent}:line 13 in /etc/fstab is bad
umount: only root can unmount /dev/sdb6 from media/sdb6

And as a further piece of the puzzle: When I launch Nautilus and try to unmount from there (by right-clicking either in the right panel or the tree on the left, I get the message:

Cannot unmount volume
The volume is not mounted

Even though I know good and well it is mounted...I can view the files on the volume and, if it were not mounted, I wouldn't be presented the "unmount" selection in the right-click drop down menu (right?). I would instead be presented with the "mount" option.

I haven't tried your method yet, knattlhuber, and I will momentarily, but thought some of my information might give you better insight on the problem. Yes, we can probably use your procedure to unmount volumes, but obviously something is wrong somewhere, and I personally would like to fix the problem, not work around it every single time I need to do it.

Thanks!

[-kg-]

Oh sheesh! I didn't notice the date of the last post in this thread!

Hopefully someone will come by and be able to give me an answer. Doing a search for this exact problem only supplied me with 4 threads, and this one was the one that contained my exact problem.

[GMachine_24]

You need to do as previously suggested, i.e. use sudo and umount in a terminal window followed by the location of the drive to unmount... then you will be prompted for root password and the drive should unmount...


as in


sudo umount /drivename


where the information after the / leads to the drive you want to unmount

This is the only way I've ever unmounted a drive.

[knattlhuber]

When automatically mounting the drive using an entry in /etc/fstab, you should set the 'users' flag. That will allow non-root users to mount/unmount the drive.
As there seems to be a problem with you fstab file, it's probably a good idea to post the content. Please do

cat /etc/fstab

in a terminal and post the output and we'll take it from there.

[Kellemora]

Wow, I had a similar problem like 3 months ago now, so I don't remember the exact details.

But I do remember when I checked the permissions, they were somehow changed to Nobody and No One.

Seems like it was just a matter of chown (something like 755?) from the root terminal and voila, it was fixed.

This happened before I started making notes on how to fix problems I encountered. But if you check man chown it should give you the exact code to use to restore your permission to that file.

Also, your fstab could be messed up as previously pointed out!

TTUL
Gary

[-kg-]

OK, here's the dump:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sdb7
UUID=0eed7f51-4808-4e8b-8483-e78f8df77d05 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sdb8
UUID=14d792bb-fb5f-4f54-ab8a-5c113dfdda72 /home ext3 relatime 0 2
# /dev/sdb9
UUID=232b4464-6725-4c4a-9a93-9922027ffe4c none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/sdb6 /media/sdb6 ntfs defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb5 /media/New Volume ntfs nls=iso8859-1,umask=000,ro 0 0
/dev/sdb5 /media/sdb5 ntfs defaults 0 0
/dev/sda2 /media/sda2 ntfs defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 /media/sda3 ntfs defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb7 /media/sdb7 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb8 /media/sdb8 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb9 /media/sdb9 swap defaults 0 0

The rest of it:

When automatically mounting the drive using an entry in /etc/fstab, you should set the 'users' flag.

I didn't knowingly or intentionally set all the drives to automatically mount. I'm not sure what I did (oh, I'm sure I did something!) to accomplish it!



This will be especially useful information for me. I have posted to the " Education Focus Group: Call for Topics" sticky in the Beginner's section and intend to attempt to re-write the hard drive partitioning section a bit for clarification and additional information.

It will take a bit...I'm thinking of a general, over-all partitioning guide with leanings towards Linux rather than a short tutorial on just setting the hard drive up for Ubuntu installation (without even mentioning extended partitions!). I'll have to do some research (some of the stuff I just know without even thinking about it) then intend to write up a draft and submit it.

[knattlhuber]

OK, first regarding the error:
Line 13 tries to mount to /media/New Volume. You should rename the that folder/fstab entry to something without a space in the name, like "NewVolume".

To enable users to mount/unmount a drive, change the flag in fstab from defaults (= 'nousers') to 'users'. Also, as the OP already pointed out, check the permissions for the folder you are mounting to (should be 744).

Finally, you have quite a list of partitions in your fstab. It's probably a good idea to label these drives (see link below for instructions). The device names are dynamically assigned at boot time. If you change the boot order of the drives (e.g. by removing a drive) this will screw up the device names and result in the wrong drives being mounted to the wrong mount points.

There is a good HowTo on /etc/fstab options:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=283131