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...
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...