[medartist]

I recently bought a LaCie porche, and it did some strange things. First, it was fine, but then after ejecting it, and unplugging it, i got the warning notice of "improper device removal". I was then later warned about the porche, and returned it for a western digital 120 gb light up firewire/usb2 hard drive. Same thing is happening, but this time, it will show up on my desktop, begin to download via the firewire cable (meanwhile the estimated time is 2 hours for 2 gb... ) and then flat out quit and disappear from the desktop. then that same rediculous warning that i want to punch in the face appears "improper device removal". I think there's a ghost in my G4. has anyone had this problem?
cheers.

[bjewett]

Wait - you dragged the disk to the trash/ejected it, then pulled the plug, then got a message about improper device removal, right?
I have had this happen to me. I don't know what is going on in Panther at the time that it does it. After dragging the disk to the trash, and the icon disappears, I bring up Terminal and do a "df" and indeed it is still there. Out of frustration I do an umount from terminal, but the bottom line seems to be trouble in the Finder. I've also seen the same disk name listed twice from a finder window. I don't think the problem is the external drive at all.
I'd recommend a reboot and/or check of your system with Disk Utility. I'm hoping Tiger fixes this and some other curious behavior I've seen from what is otherwise an incredible OS.