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Obviously it will stop working.. but what would go first, how long till it halts etc. Lets say we're at the desktop with no running programs. Assuming disk is not hot-pluggable.

iam4k33m
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The system shouldn't halt, because the critical software is loaded into memory. You'd get lots of errors and most things wouldn't work.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad
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  • That's not entirely true. Some programs and shared libraries may have been discarded (partially) from main memory to make space for more recently used things. A later access to these virtual memory pages would cause a hard page fault that is now unsatisfiable because the underlying storage device is no more. I'm not sure how the kernel reacts to that but falls somewhere between between a forceful termination of the page-faulting process and a kernel panic. – David Foerster Mar 17 '17 at 14:07