I don't have the exact messages right here but I think you all know what I mean. I copied some "large" files to a USB stick and because I was in a hurry I rightclicked and did an umount. There was a notification that there needs to be data written on the stick. That worked well. Because this USB stick is not very fast it took quite a long time to write the cache. Too long. I don't remember the exact message but it was related to hal. In fact I'm not even sure if this problem is in xfce or in hal or just in the standard-settings of hal in Archlinux. It was something like that the device is busy and cannot be umounted. Then the stick was obviously not marked as mounted in volman because clicking on it raised an error that it could not be mounted. If you need the exact messages I will reproduce this and make screenshots but since I experienced this in Ubuntu some time ago and now again on Archlinux I think some people should have experienced this issue and know what I'm talking about. It never did much harm to the filesystem, just some missing files, but now it totally wrecked the folder which was not completely transferred. (fat32) So there is a possibility that this is a problem. I don't know if this timeout is in thunar-volman but if it is, it should definitely be higher or even indefinitly with an option to abort the unmounting process. If it is not in xfce at all please direct me to the right developers (hal?) so that I can complain there. :)
I'd guess it's the default D-BUS timeout.
(In reply to comment #1) > I'd guess it's the default D-BUS timeout. Hm... I cannot remember this happening in gnome. If it is a dbus setting maybe gnome suppresses that behaviour? I'm not so much into hal and dbus. Do you know how to change the timeout? I was not able to find the configuration option in /etc/dbus-1/
This is actually a serious bug that causes data corruption. It's been reported here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=105225 Basically, if you write large amounts of data to the disk (> 200mb), and then try to unmount, thunar reports a "reply timeout" error. The subsequent data is corrupted. If anyone has a way to manually change the dbus timeout that would be great. I can't seem to find a way to do that.
Didn't realize this was an old bug. But I'm still getting it. However, I'm using a slightly dated version of thunar-volman (0.3.80-1) and thunar (1.0.2) I read that thunar-volman is moving away from using HAL to mount/umount disks. Does the latest version of thunar-volman still use HAL?
Closing. Please reopen if still reproducible on an up-to-date system.