Guys. Before 4.10, when I use "Safely remove XXX" to remove a partition from an external harddrive, it just umounts the partition so that I can re-mount it again later. But now, it umounts the partition, then remove the usb device from the system (somethings powers off the devices, e.g. usb pen drives). OK, this should be the ideal action for "Safely remove", but it is not very convenient because if I want to remount these partitions, then I have to take out the usb plug, then re-plug it into my computer. Is there any way to bring back the old behavior to Dolphin?

Just did more test. This behavior is not consistent. It unmounts partitions on some types of USB harddrive, but ejects the device on some other types. e.g. on my Maxtor external harddrive, it does not eject, but with my Freecom usb drive, it ejects the device.

I am not sure why the behaviour change was made exactly, however I do know that the eject command is only issued for certain classes of devices - which includes removable media (external hard drives are often viewed as fixed).

I believe this change may have made to satisfy certain types of devices such as MP3 players and Mobile Phones which use the eject determination to signify that they have been safely removed.

bcooksley wrote:I am not sure why the behaviour change was made exactly, however I do know that the eject command is only issued for certain classes of devices - which includes removable media (external hard drives are often viewed as fixed).

I believe this change may have made to satisfy certain types of devices such as MP3 players and Mobile Phones which use the eject determination to signify that they have been safely removed.

After some googling, I am not sure that this is because of KDE any more. if Dolphin uses udisks to do this kind of mount, unmount and detach tasks, then it could be related to udisks policy. The command "udisks --umount XXX" will unmount the specified partition only, but "udisks --detach XXX" will try to detach the device from the system, provided the device itself supports this. Maxtor usb harddrives seems to have a problem with this. It cannot be detached, but I guess this is a driver problem.

So if Dolphin uses udisks-daemon and by "Safely remove XXX" it does something similar to "udisks --detach", then this would not be an problem in KDE. But I would like to see that Dolphin offers an "unmount" option in the menu to allow uses to unmount partition on any kind of hard drives, not only those on internal hard drives.

In this case, I suggest filing a bug report, although it may be difficult to find the correct wording which will make sense to many people. More intelligent logic on how to determine if a device is external or internal would be welcome however I suspect.

I'm afraid there's little we can do inside Dolphin. We just use the function Solid::StorageAccess::teardown(). According to the API docs, this function unmounts the volume.