A weird error I forgot to mention

[sniffnoy]

So back before spring break, when my computer was crapping itself, I had to at one point reformat my USB stick because its file system had gotten corrupted and so Linux wouldn't write to it. When I did so I initially didn't bother to give the disk a name, which ended up causing the computer to read some bytes that just happened to be there for its name. Naturally, not all of these were ASCII display characters.

This had the odd result that when I hit "eject" when I was done with it... the unmount failed. Same thing when tried it manually. But when I switched to root and tried unmounting it, it worked fine. This happened every time until I renamed the disk, after which it could be unmounted as normal.

-Harry

Comments

[joshuazelinsky.livejournal.com]

Some sort of accidental injection attack? Maybe the name had something that was being interpreted as a special character? I don't know. That's just weird.

Most of the time when I hear someone making a claim close to this I figure they just aren't explaining what happened correctly. But that's generally due to computer illiterate people using terminology all wrong or just not noticing what they are doing that actually matters. However, when you report something weird, I know that's actually what was happening.

(Incidentally, did you keep a copy of what the initial name was for the USB to see if renaming it that recreates the problem?)

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

I didn't. I never even bothered to determine just what it consisted of.