Google

« International Characters (utf8) in vfat on Linux
looping through files with spaces in the filenames in bash »

ejecting iPod under Linux

Symptom: iPod is blinking “Do Not Disconnect” even after you’ve umounted the filesystem. You need to eject the iPod. Umounting is not enough. You need to send an ALLOW_MEDIUM_REMOVAL to the usb device. The easiest way is with eject. Depending on your system, you may need to be root, or allow suid on eject (chmod u+s `which eject`). I’ve found that suid on eject is the most consistent solution, but I don’t like suid executables on the system. sudo should also work, but I haven’t tested this yet.

There is a patch in the recent eject that should solve this if you own the device (chown `whoami` /dev/devicename). Anyway, if your device was mounted under /media/usbdisk, do this:
eject /media/usbdisk
 (This just executes “eject /dev/sde” on my system, but it doesn’t require you knowing the device name) After a few seconds your iPod will flash and you’ll be ready to go again…

If you already umounted the filesystem, eject will not work. You’ll need to try remounting the filesystem and ejecting or just pull the plug and reconnect.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 16:43 and is filed under Linux, iPod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “ejecting iPod under Linux”

  1. bart Says:
    January 1st, 2007 at 04:30

    thanks for the tip. it’s just what I needed.
    It worked

    bart.

  2. Arjun Pakrashi Says:
    January 12th, 2009 at 08:42

    rightclick on the removable device representing the iPod, then click Eject
    or do

    mount

    and see where your iPod got mounted, and note the device
    Example: you see that your iPod is mounted on /media/my_ipod and its disk device is /dev/sdb1

    then do

    eject /dev/sdb

  3. Get-A-Free-Iphone Says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 01:30

    great site and informative posts

Leave a Reply