safely remove USB drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter sobriquet
  • Start date Start date
S

sobriquet

Hi.

Sometimes when you've copied things from one USB drive to another and
it has completed,
you can't seem to remove the hardware safely via the icon in the
system tray.
I suppose windows is indexing the disk or something.
Is there a way to stop this which is more convenient than rebooting
the computer?

At first I thought the solution was to disable indexing somehow, by
unchecking the box for "index this station for faster searching" in
the properties for the drive, but it seems this must
be done for every drive you connect and it results in windows going
through the entire drive
doing some sort of modification and I very much dislike the idea of
windows going over the entire contents of the drive to make
modifications.

kind regards and thanks in advance for any suggestions, Niek
 
sobriquet said:
Sometimes when you've copied things from one USB drive
to another and it has completed, you can't seem to remove
the hardware safely via the icon in the system tray.
Click to expand...

Have you tried stopping it a second time ?

I do use a USB hard drive docking station for convenient overflow
of the PVR and do sometimes have to stop the USB drive twice,
but it always works fine the second time when the first doesnt.

I do close the explorer windows that show the drives before doing that tho.
I suppose windows is indexing the disk or something.
Click to expand...

Its more likely something.
Is there a way to stop this which is more convenient than rebooting the computer?
Click to expand...

Yes, I find that closing the explorer windows that use the drive you want to
remove and then stopping the drive a second time if necessary always works.
At first I thought the solution was to disable indexing somehow,
by unchecking the box for "index this station for faster searching"
in the properties for the drive, but it seems this must be done for
every drive you connect and it results in windows going through
the entire drive doing some sort of modification and I very much
dislike the idea of windows going over the entire contents of the
drive to make modifications.
Click to expand...

I never find that to be a problem and havent stopped indexing on those drives.
 
Have you tried stopping it a second time ?
Click to expand...

Yes, sometimes this works, but often I can stop it 10 times and it
still tells me it can't stop the drive. Of course I close all explorer
windows before attempting to remove the drive (as well as all
programs that might be accessing data on the drive).
I do use a USB hard drive docking station for convenient overflow
of the PVR and do sometimes have to stop the USB drive twice,
but it always works fine the second time when the first doesnt.

I do close the explorer windows that show the drives before doing that tho.


Its more likely something.
Click to expand...

But what could this mysterious activity be if it's not indexing and
I'm sure I've closed all applications and explorer windows that I've
used related to accessing the contents of the drive?

I'm also sure it's not some iso on the drive that I forgot to unmount
or something along those lines.
 
Yes, sometimes this works, but often I can stop it 10 times and it
still tells me it can't stop the drive. Of course I close all explorer
windows before attempting to remove the drive (as well as all
programs that might be accessing data on the drive).


But what could this mysterious activity be if it's not indexing and
I'm sure I've closed all applications and explorer windows that I've
used related to accessing the contents of the drive?

I'm also sure it's not some iso on the drive that I forgot to unmount
or something along those lines.
Click to expand...

When this happens I start up OpenFilesView from NirSoft and see what's
accessing the drive. Usually it's explorer.exe; so I use the utility to
close the file handle that explorer has opened, and then it ejects without
a complaint.
 
Mike S. said:
sobriquet wrote: [...]
in the properties for the drive, but it seems this must be done for
every drive you connect and it results in windows going through
the entire drive doing some sort of modification and I very much
dislike the idea of windows going over the entire contents of the
drive to make modifications.

I never find that to be a problem and havent stopped indexing on those drives.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
When this happens I start up OpenFilesView from NirSoft and see what's
accessing the drive. Usually it's explorer.exe; so I use the utility to
close the file handle that explorer has opened, and then it ejects without
a complaint.
Click to expand...

I love it how something that is completely standard under Linux ('lsof',
list open files) requires an external tool under Windows. But yes,
that is definitely the way to debug this type of problem.

Arno
 
When this happens I start up OpenFilesView from NirSoft and see what's
accessing the drive. Usually it's explorer.exe; so I use the utility to
close the file handle that explorer has opened, and then it ejects without
a complaint.
Click to expand...

One method I used sometimes was to kill the explorer process via the
task manager and restart it, that sometimes would fix the problem, but
unfortunately it can cause icons to disappear from the systemtray and
that is a cumbersome problem (because the only way to recover the
icons is to remove them from the task manager in order to restart them
so they icons come back).

The wonderful world of windows.. *sigh*
 
sobriquet wrote
Yes, sometimes this works, but often I can stop it 10 times and it
still tells me it can't stop the drive. Of course I close all explorer
windows before attempting to remove the drive (as well as all
programs that might be accessing data on the drive).
OK.
Click to expand...
But what could this mysterious activity be if it's not indexing
and I'm sure I've closed all applications and explorer windows
that I've used related to accessing the contents of the drive?
Click to expand...

Looks like something specific to the hardware or something given that
I never see that effect and havent turned anything like indexing off.
I'm also sure it's not some iso on the drive that I
forgot to unmount or something along those lines.
Click to expand...

OK, it wasnt clear that you were aware of that sort of thing.
 
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