Can't format usb drive that has been mounted read only even after unmounting

[rehaby]

Plug in a USB drive and a dialog appears asking if you want to mount your disk read only. If you click read only, then open drive setup and unmount the partition, drive setup doesn't let you format the drive

[humdinger]

I was about to say, "can't replicate"... (with hrev51402).

It works, if you unmount the partition in DriveSetup. Then the partition stays visible in DriveSetup, just not mounted.
If you unmount the partition in Tracker, however, all the partions on the USB stick disappear in DriveSetup, leaving only the /dev/disk/usb/0/0/raw device and no way to select and format a partition on it.

No idea if that's a bug or feature.

[pulkomandy]

It's a "feature". Unmounting from Tracker does an "eject"-like operation. For CD drives, the disk is ejected, for USB sticks, the whole stick is powered off.

DriveSetup does just an unmount, which does not go this far.

I agree it is a bit confusing, and maybe the Tracker menu item should be called "eject" to make this a little clearer. Not sure having both "unmount" and "eject" menu items in Tracker would be a good addition, or just adding more confusion.

[humdinger]

I don't think it's a big problem. After all, you can just quickly unplug and replug.
OTOH, is there any harm in not "ejecting" USB sticks and only ever do simple unmounting, like DriveSetup does? I guess they'd continue drawing a bit of power, but people concious of that can just unplug the stick...

[rehaby]

I was having big problems as the mount as read only setting was being remembered when the drive was plugged in again. Ended up formatting the drive on my other computer instead

[humdinger]

That's strange indeed. In Tracker prefs you can check the automatic disk mounting. But even if it's activated for all disks, you should always get the alert to choose read/write or read-only or cancel. At least if there's write support for that non-bfs-filesystem. Otherwise it'll indeed be auto-mounted read-only.
Which filesystem was used on that partition?

[rehaby]

From memory it was a boot USB for ubuntu mate, so I guess that is FAT32. I think I was unmounting and mounting the disk without unplugging it. I can try again when I get home tonight and see if I can reproduce the issue

[rehaby]

I got something similar to happen.

Steps to reproduce
Plug in FAT32flash drive
mount it on desktop
open DriveSetup
Unmount disk from desktop

now you can't do anything with the disk device in drive setup and you can't remount the flash drive?
even doing Disk->Rescan doesn't help

Seems like unmount on the desktop should be called eject for a flash drive and DriveSetup should not display devices that have been ejected after a rescan?