I recently installed Debian Testing on a new laptop and I just noticed that I am having some issues with unmounting external hard drives. I am using Mate Desktop 1.8.1.

With the 1st drive, if I right click on the drive and select “safely remove”: The drive unmounts, spins down, immediately spins back up an remounts. Unable to unmount.

With the 2nd drive, if I right click on the drive and select “safely remove”: The drive unmounts but does not spin down.

With the 3rd drive, if I right click on the drive and select “safely remove”: The drive unmounts but does not spin down, immediately spins back up but does not remount, and after 20 seconds, it spins down and stays that way.

Behavior is the same on both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports.

On my last laptop, on which I also used Debian Testing + Mate desktop, the safe removal of drives worked out of the box and I never had an issue with it. The drives would unmount, spin down and stay that way. To remount the drive, one needed to unplug the device and plug it back in.

I am unsure how to troubleshoot this issue and I am not sure if it is merely a matter of installing a “missing” package of editing a config file.

Thank you in advance.