Cant eject any external drives..any ideas?

[iamloco724]

im running windows xp..i have 5 external drives plus an ipod

i cant safely remove any of these drives including the ipod ive tried waiting hours after they were last used still doesnt work

never use to have this problem i have the same software setup ive always had

ive tried a program called unlocker or something like that but basically it doesnt find the files on any of the drives being in use

i have no problem ejecting my flash drives though

theres gotta be a way to fix this i dont want to just pull out my drives and dont want to have to shutdown to remove them

any ideas and help would be greatly appreciated

 

[Wamphryi]

I have had this issue as well. What I normally do is make sure any explorer windows are closed and that any obvious programs that are using the drives are closed. Then I just unplug them anyway. I do this with a SATA hot swap bay I use. I have never had any problems accessing the drives later but as always it pays to make sure that your data is backed up. Try making up a test drive and see how you go with that. If after a few swaps and assuming there are no problems just go with closing obvious programs.

 

[sminlal]

In Windows 7 there will be an "error" event recorded in the System Event log that indicates what's preventing the drive from being dismounted.

 

[rand_79]

just turn off write caching so all data is written immediately.
and it wont matter..
im some windows os this option is called

optimize for quick removal.

 

[sminlal]

just turn off write caching so all data is written immediately. and it wont matter..

It can be dangerous to remove a drive without doing the "safely remove" action even if write caching is turned off. Just because I/O operations aren't cached doesn't mean that programs don't have files open on the drive, or that all of the file system operations have been quiesced. You can minimize the risk by waiting until the activity light on the drive stops flashing, but that still isn't an absolute guarantee and it can cause programs to hang if they had files open on the drive.

 

[Wamphryi]

I think that the problem is that there are so many background programs accessing everything these days it makes the safe eject feature obsolete. For instance I use Intel Rapid Storage Technology which always is the first to pipe up if I remove a SATA drive on the go. Before we had "safe eject" we had the floppy disk regime where disks where added and removed as a matter of course. As long as the programs using them had finished and file manager (Remember that?) was closed then there was no problems. I bit of thought and common sense will keep your drives safe. Of course one always has ones data backed up as that is just part of what has to be done. It is still safe and desirable to use ones brain.

 

[rand_79]

It can be dangerous to remove a drive without doing the "safely remove" action even if write caching is turned off. Just because I/O operations aren't cached doesn't mean that programs don't have files open on the drive, or that all of the file system operations have been quiesced. You can minimize the risk by waiting until the activity light on the drive stops flashing, but that still isn't an absolute guarantee and it can cause programs to hang if they had files open on the drive.

the original post was about a flash drive

I guess I assumed he would be loading a file then saving a file.

not running programs off it.

if you have programs installed to a usb drive or 50 files open.. yes its a bad idea.

if you open then save a pdf file to it and thats all you are doing.. its pretty harmless.

obviously you would want to close any open programs using files on the drive first.

 

[sminlal]

Actually he was talking about "5 external drives plus and IPod", and mentioned that he didn't have problems with his flash drive.

Nonetheless, I hate to make assumptions and I try to keep in mind that these posts get read by lots of different people after the fact - so I think it's good practice to make sure nobody walks away with misconceptions that may hurt them down the road.