External Enclosure not able to be ejected?

Erind

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Jan 29, 2007
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18,510
I have a Seagate 120 GB laptop drive in a MassCool external enclosure. The drive performs fantastically. My problem is that when I go to safely remove the drive, it says it can't. I have shut down EVERY program, I use ProcessExplorer (formerly from Sysinternals, now Microsoft) to ensure there are no handles associated with the external drive, and I manually shut down any programs running from the drive.

I figured it was perhaps uncached files sitting on the system keeping a hold on it, but I have that feature of XP enabled to always write the data to the drive to prevent that. I also use SYNC.EXE (also from Sysinternals) which syncs all uncached data to the drive.

The one thing I have noticed is in any hard drive management utility, it is listed as a Local Drive and not a Removable one. Is this a shortcoming of the drivers being used by MassCool or something?

I do run a lot of programs from this drive, such as portable firefox, thunderbird, pstart, etc. When I run applications is when it seems I can't use the safe removal option, but I haven't tested this extensively to say for sure this is the only time it occurs.

Perhaps Windows is holding onto some prefetch files or something? I have no clue...
 

mpjesse

Splendid
I think you pretty much answered your own question. Sounds to me like WinXP is using the drive in some capacity at all times. When you start doing things like syncing, it's no wonder.

My advice would be to not use the drive in the fashion that you are. I mean... why is it necessary to use Thunderbird and Firefox from a portable hard drive? Do you have other laptops or something?
 

Erind

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Jan 29, 2007
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I take a lot of my work from home and to work again and a hard drive is 10x easier than a laptop. Having my shortcuts, passwords, etc, it's almost a necessity.

As far as SYNC.EXE, it's just a Sysinternals app that writes to the hard drive anything that was cached, essentially clearing the write cache for that drive. Theoretically, it should kill any times to the drive as far as unwritten data.