New Owner

[NightWhistler]

Originally Posted by Godzil

Because your ASUS and HTC use ActiveSync, they are NOT a UMS Device. You USB Key Drive NEED to be safely removed, like the Cybook.

And the 1.4.923 should be nearly the same as the MobileRead one

Anybody running Linux should be fairly familiar with this process of mounting and unmounting. Windows pretty much works the same way though, it's just less explicit about it.

The problem is buffering: your OS tends to be 'smart' about copying things to USB drives. This means that when it reports that it's done copying data to the device, what it really means is:

'I'm done reading all the data that I'm going to copy to the device, and I've queued it to be written'.

Try this by copying a big file to the device, and immediately selecting "safely remove hardware". It will often ask you to wait for a few seconds while all the buffers are emptied and data is copied.

If you simply pop out the device without safely removing it, you might be stuck with a partial file, or worse: a corrupted filesystem.

[rireed3]

Thanks for the explanations.

I'm familiar with the concepts, but only ever had ActiveSync on USB. My only removable mass storage for years has been burned CD-ROM.

Richard

[LazyScot]

I've had problems on Windows PCs with over enthusiastic virus scanners and other background programs that access mounted drives without your knowledge. Now whilst they shouldn't cause problems (as they are only reading), they can confuse some of the marked states on files and drives.

Hence regardless of the settings, I always unmount disks. I've had sufficiently nasty problems (not with liseuse, but with other devices) that I'll even shut down the Windows machine if the unmount says please try later....

[momghoti]

Hence regardless of the settings, I always unmount disks. I've had sufficiently nasty problems (not with liseuse, but with other devices) that I'll even shut down the Windows machine if the unmount says please try later....
__________________

What do you mean by that? I had a situation today when the Remove Hardware Safely asked me to try later but I *really* needed to detach the cybook--Windows was trying to do an upgrade and kept wanting to restart. It took about ten minutes for the RHS to let me disconnect. Can there be a problem with the detachable storage that could keep it from safely being removed? Hung, as it were?

[LazyScot]

Originally Posted by momghoti

What do you mean by that? I had a situation today when the Remove Hardware Safely asked me to try later but I *really* needed to detach the cybook--Windows was trying to do an upgrade and kept wanting to restart. It took about ten minutes for the RHS to let me disconnect. Can there be a problem with the detachable storage that could keep it from safely being removed? Hung, as it were?

If I get the "please try later" message, it usually means that something is accessing the device. In my case, this is typically either virus scanner or backup software or windows indexing service (which seems to have an ability to restart itself no matter how enthusiastically I tell it the service should not be started...). Typically these are background things that I have no real idea if they are running until I get these sorts of messages.

Now most of those only read data, so generally unplugging at that point doesn't cause a problem, but at least some filesystems (NTFS is an example; I'm not sure about FAT) do keep markers that say a filesystem is "in use" which can confuse things. Also, without knowning how the device behaves, it is possible that it gets confused if it is trying to respond to a read request to a host computer from which it has been disconnected. This is typically why remove processes say "Please wait" at this point (it can also cause nasty problems for the process reading the data, if it is not well written...).

I have used the shutdown/restart to release the device in which case I pull the USB cable out once the host computer has shutdown.

[Idoine]

Originally Posted by momghoti

What do you mean by that? I had a situation today when the Remove Hardware Safely asked me to try later but I *really* needed to detach the cybook--Windows was trying to do an upgrade and kept wanting to restart. It took about ten minutes for the RHS to let me disconnect. Can there be a problem with the detachable storage that could keep it from safely being removed? Hung, as it were?

I had that message sometimes too. That was because of calibre that was attempting to load the Cybook content, or Mobipocket Reader. I take the precaution to close all the programs that could be accessing the Cybook before using the RHS.
From time to time, nonetheless, I have the message again, because Mobipocket Reader is not well closed : its process is still running (reader.exe).