I have a hard drive that gets plugged into several machines. One MacBook Pro running Mac OS X, some Ubuntu and Fedora Installations and sometimes Windows XP or Vista. Therefore, I formatted it NTFS to be able to read and write on it no matter which machine is used. On Mac OS I installed MacFUSE to do this. 

The Problem is, when the USB device is removed from a Windows box, without using the "remove hardware" function from the task bar, the drive is locked. When I wnat to mount it in Mac OS, I get an error message and have to connect it to back to Windows and cleanly unmount it.

So, my question is: Is there an easy way to use the drive on every computer / OS without mounting problems? 


Question: No sound in Ubuntu except at log in
Answer: Try

killall pulseaudio


and go to System Settings → Sound → Output tab → Connector → Analog Output  

This solved it for me.