shut off external hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sanford Aranoff
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Sanford Aranoff

I have a Maxtor external hard drive. It used to be that I would press a
button on the taskbar saying to stop external hard drive. When I got the
favorable message, I would shut the drive. Now it says that the drive
cannot be stopped. Maxtor advised me to power down the computer, and
then shut off the drive. This works, but is inconvient. Any advice?

Thanks.
 
Sanford said:
I have a Maxtor external hard drive. It used to be that I would
press a button on the taskbar saying to stop external hard drive.
When I got the favorable message, I would shut the drive. Now it
says that the drive cannot be stopped. Maxtor advised me to power
down the computer, and then shut off the drive. This works, but is
inconvient. Any advice?
Click to expand...

Long as you know you are not writing anything to it.. Disconnect it and take
it with you.
 
Sometimes you will write to the drive with a program
(Windows Explorer is famous for this, at least on my
computers) and it keeps the connection to the drive open for
a long time. If you click on the Safely remove icon and
click on the drive and it comes up with the "can't close"
message, click on it again and see if it has closed. You
also need to make sure that any program that has addressed
the drive is closed or the file menu system has referenced
another drive (Explorer.) The other thing that you can
check is to make sure that Write caching is turned off on
the disk. Right click My Computer, left click Manage. Left
click device Manager and then click on the + next to Disk
drives. Right click on the drive and then click on
Properties then the Policies tab. Turn off the Enable write
caching on the disk and turn on the Optimize for quick
removal (if the Enable was checked.)


And as Shenan stated, if you are absolutely sure that all
data has been written to the drive you can simply turn it
off. I always wait for at least 2 minutes with no activity
after a write to my USB drives before I attempt to remove
them like this. If you get an error message stating that a
device has been removed and data can't be written to it, you
know that it had not properly closed a file and data may be
corrupted on the drive. Run a CHKDSK on the drive the next
time you fire it up.
 
Sanford said:
I have a Maxtor external hard drive. It used to be that I would press a
button on the taskbar saying to stop external hard drive. When I got the
favorable message, I would shut the drive. Now it says that the drive
cannot be stopped. Maxtor advised me to power down the computer, and
then shut off the drive. This works, but is inconvient. Any advice?
Click to expand...

Try to discover who has an open handle to the drive:

Get Sysinternals ProcessExplorer
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

Start the ProcessExplorer. Go to 'Find'->'Find Handle' and enter
the root path (like U:\) of your drive. Click 'Search'.
Then it lists all processes that hold open handles to your drive.


Uwe
 
Sanford said:
Thanks. I did this. Nothing has an open handle.
Click to expand...


Hmm... Any virus or adware watchers active? They may hang
deeper in the system than the ProcessExplorer can watch.
Then try to stop them before you prepare the drive for
save removal.


Uwe
 
Hmm... Any virus or adware watchers active? They may hang
deeper in the system than the ProcessExplorer can watch.
Then try to stop them before you prepare the drive for
save removal.

Uwe
Click to expand...

Panda anti-virus is active. ProcessExplorer does tell me this. It may
work to stop Panda. The trouble is that restarting Panda is a bother, as
it forgets all the settings. It is easier to reboot. If Panda is the
problem, it means that there is no easy way to shut off the drive. I am
afraid simply to shut off the power. This may cause data loss. This
happened to me once, and I do not want to experiment with it.
 
Sanford said:
Panda anti-virus is active. ProcessExplorer does tell me this. It may
work to stop Panda. The trouble is that restarting Panda is a bother, as
it forgets all the settings. It is easier to reboot. If Panda is the
problem, it means that there is no easy way to shut off the drive. I am
afraid simply to shut off the power. This may cause data loss. This
happened to me once, and I do not want to experiment with it.
Click to expand...

Executing Sysinternals SYNC before switching off the
drive should avoid data loss as long as no app is
just writing to the disk. Unfortunally in requires
admin previleges:
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Sync.html


Uwe
 
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