Safely Remove Hardware...not working with External

[willhenderson]

ok - so i was told to just use the Safely Remove Hardware feature, when unplugging my external hard drive from my computer. and ive been doing that and it works although just recently i went to do that.....but guess what? i recieve this darned error


i understand it could be due to something on the drive being in "use" so i close everything, & even after a restart it still doesnt work, what could it be? how do i unplug it without damaging anything?

thanks for any help

[ViRaL1]

shut down

[redwudz]

I agree with ViRaL1. That's the safest way. With some of my USB thumb drives, I have had the same problem. A program or something on the drive still wants to keep open the link. With a thumb drive, I just unplug it, but not a good idea with hard drives.

With most removable hard drives, you can set the drive to 'Optimize for quick removal'. That's in 'Device Manager>Disk Drives>(Your drive)'. But you would be better off to find what is wanting to keep access to the drive and change or remove it. You should be able to see what is running in Task Manager.

Unplugging it while it is writing or reading is the worst case, and will likely result in data corruption.

[ahhaa]

it could easily be folder thumbnails that haven't updated yet...

[scorps]

Are you just clicking the task bar icon and choosing remove ? If the answers yes then try double clicking it then click stop for that device. Sometimes works, sometimes not.

[oldandinthe way]

If you are running MSIndex service on your system it could be indexing or running the msdefragger (dfrgntfs.exe) in the background. Could also be diskkeeper.

Anything you have on your system which runs in the background could be responsible, including anti-virus, anti-spyware etc, etc. And their behavior could have changed due to recent updates.


Do not unplug.

[creakndale]

Try emptying the Recycle bin then do your Safely Remove Hardware sequence.

[sitlet]

i had this same problem with my external drivers. i found the problem was a program for musicmatch that scans the drives was still accessing my external drives. download process explorer from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/ProcessExplorer.mspx

run the program. go to find-find handle and type in the name of your drive. so if your drive is on letter f, type "F:" without the quotes. it will tell you whats still running on the drive, then hir ctrl-alt-del and end that program

[willhenderson]

Thanks guys, I ended up shutting the pc off and unplugging it while it was "off'" everything appears to be good

thanks for the tips though
i'll get that process explorer^ just to have in hand in case it happens again thanks ya'll