Question Can't eject devices, could it be a problem?

DynV

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Aug 13, 2009
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When I connect some devices, like tablets and cell phones, they don't create a drive (ie H:\) but instead add an entry on the Windows Explorer sidepanel, that when clicking on it will lead to something that look just like a drive look like. The vast majority of the time it works just fine but there's a problematic case, and another which I keep wondering if it could be one; the former that I can't access it through command line (cmd.exe), which I haven't needed yet and seldomly think of it; the latter which I often think about: I can't find a way to eject them and it's bothering me as I keep wondering if not doing so would either corrupt data on the device I'm about to unplug, or that there was some data held back (ie in a cache) that was to be transferred upon ejection.

Thank you for your feedback
 
A mounted filesystem, if not read-only, can corrupt upon unplug if not done cleanly. If either the filesystem was not mounted, or if it is read-only, then no unplug will harm it.

For some filesystems there is an ability to at least partially correct, e.g., NTFS, but not VFAT/FAT32/FAT16. In the case of a mounted read-write system where some change has occurred, then yanking the connector will have bad results with any filesystem type, but with NTFS it will self-correct (it won't corrupt, but you might lose the most recently written data). VFAT would require a filesystem check before next mount and would risk corruption without that if the wrong thing were corrupted when yanking the connector.