Safely remove drive

Robm1955

I'm trying to safely remove an external drive I've had connected to my pc, but I get the message windows can't stop your Generic volume device because it is in use. It says to close any programs or windows that may be using the device, and try again. As far as I can see, there are no programs using the drive. How do I find out what programs, or processes are using/accessing it?

getmore4less

Shutdown the PC.

Uxb

I find that logging out/switching user and then switching back solves this one

Oblivion

Does it have an activity light on it and if so is it still flashing? This will be an indication that it hasn't finished it's task and is still working with data buffered in memory. Once the activity light stops blinking it should then allow you to activate the Safely Remove option.

If it still doesn't work, I often find moving the focus of attention away from the external drive in Windows Explorer by clicking on the C drive, or opening a document from the C drive will do the trick.

Gillor

As previously mentioned the easiest way is to switch the machine off, remove the external drive and reboot.

Alternatively this has also worked for me.

bsod

By the time you come back and read the responses, it won't be in use any longer.

Robm1955

Thanks for the replies. Turned the pc off on this occasion, but it doesn't save me any time, so your other suggestions are helpful. Thanks.

arrallas

Take a look at your anti-virus settings - you may find that it is set to scan external USB devices whenever they are connected.

anotheruser

If you know ytou're not copying to/from it, then just unplug.

CLICK (contains swears)

Strider590

Make sure you don't have any of the drives folders open on your desktop, this causes windows to access files on it, in order to create thumbnail previews.

Make sure you close any program that was used to access the drive, Microsoft office is one of the worst and anti-virus can be a pain too.

Sometimes windows itself latches onto drives and won't let them be removed, usually because of processing thumbnails or indexing for searching.
Go to start menu, type "taskmgr", in task manager select the process tab, highlight any "explorer" process and hit delete, end all "explorer" processes, goto applications tab, select "new task" and type "explorer". This effectively restarts windows without shutting down the PC and forces explorer to let go of any external drives it might be latching onto.

Failing all of the above, download a legit copy of the latest version of "unlocker", a progam that forces other programs to release external drives.

NEVER just unplug the device in these circumstances, the reason it's locked is a program is accessing the devices master file table, a list that tells windows where on the drive each file is, like a storage location list in a warehouse, if that table is being accessed when you pull the drive, then you can lose everything.

anotheruser

I rarely use the "Remove Hardware" and I've NEVER had a problem.
Seriously, all it does is kill the task that is using the drive. If you're confident you're not using the drive (IE: copying to/from it) then just un-plug it.

Installing other programs just to "unlock" the drive is a silly idea. You can do exactly what the program will do from the Task Manager under the processes tab... if you know what you're doing.

Restarting explorer doesn't "restart windows without restarting the PC" - it reboots explorer. Other processes can still be running in the background.
You can't install some updates, then reboot explorer and hope it'll be okay as the PC needs an actual restart.