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    I also had to use sudo to get this command to finish (all it would do was unmount the drive before saying it was unable to open the file). Other than that, helpful answer. Commented Jan 31, 2016 at 5:16
  • Under-appreciated answer in this thread. Just look at a FAT32 mounted thumb drive, and notice how unmounting and ejecting have a world of difference just in the file explorer (ie: nautilus) alone. A simple Sansa clip would also help demonstrate this. Commented Sep 21, 2016 at 5:17
  • The device is still present when executing lsusb. So you don't have to reset the whole USB-Subsystem. Just the device is sufficient. You can use usbreset to do this github.com/jkulesza/usbreset github.com/CWempe/usbreset The usbreset.c files are identically in both projects, Commented Jun 15, 2019 at 7:17
  • How do I know that "sda" is the right one? Can I map sda, sdb, etc to the real device names? Commented Oct 31, 2019 at 13:29
  • you can use blkid as in sudo blkid /dev/sda1 to get the label of your usb drive, if it has one. Otherwise you can always revert to the dumb way, which is to check the size of drives listed with sudo lsblk. Of course this assumes you know the drive's size, and it differs significantly from other devices... Commented May 17, 2020 at 1:19