Why is unmount taking so long?

[tearinghairout]

Hi all

I have just finished copying 1.6G of data (about 3000 files) off a borked XP laptop onto a usb mounted external hard drive (FAT32) and I have asked it to unmount the external drive.

It is now sitting there with a progress bar that is not moving and lots of activity on the remote hard drive. It has been like this for several minutes.

Does anybody know what it is doing? I guess it will finish eventually, but I'm just curious as to what is going on.

Thanks
THO

BTW. Using Knoppix V4.0.2CD-2005-09-23-en.

[maxIT]

Not sure, just a tought,
but I guess that when you 'copy' this 'very big amount of data' doesn't happen that it will be saved directly into your phisical drive, but instead in a sort of computer cache.
When you give the 'umount' command is when the phisical saving occurs, and external usb data transfer is surely slower than computer cache.

[posmanet]

This one is absolutely correct.
Transfers are being cached, so that copy processes may be finished before all data is written do usb disc. When you umount, cache data has to be written to disc, of course, before the drive can be detached. Especially on USB1 connections this cann take quite a while.

Greets