"generic volume cannot be stopped" windows 7

My usb external hd is Western Digital, and I can't remove it safely about 20% of the time. I've searched the internet for hours, and all I find are BS answers like "download such-and-such program" or "close everything that's using it" (yeah no kidding lol). This should be a really common problem, why isn't there the one simple fix-all solution out there like for "how to partition drives" or something?

 

There are probably open file handles, set a filter for your disk and then kill the process: Process Explorer

 

..if you open the event viewer (type Event viewer in the start menu), and go to "Windows logs">"System", after a "safely remove" request fails - you get a "warning" event for each program that prevented the request. Easy thing you can check first, to maybe solve whatever it is without brute force.

But if it's a mysterious process that's part of a windows library, etc, then you probably should spend some time with process-explorer like Allurgroceries says, and maybe ad-aware, for example.

But it could be something like the thumbnailer finding a file that uses a codec pack that fails to clean up, etc.. And then the solution isn't exactly obvious, because the process is: "explorer.exe", and that's that.. Same with wmp/library with sharing. Never used those for computers that move between networks, because it has never worked well.

 

where do i view the "warnings" on the event viewer?

also, if i were to download a program, how is process-explorer different from say, Unlocker, which kept coming up in my searches?

 

From the top left.. second entry. Windows logs -> System. The window should have a bunch of events (most likely just notifications), sorted on date. If you try and fail a "safely remove" now, at least one triangle event should turn up in that window on the top.

The "unlocker" is another brute force solution. It finds the reference and closes the filereader. That.. shouldn't be necessary if only you are using that computer. And if you force it, you're not really finding the problem, and could be getting errors, and so on (even if they say it's not supposed to happen, because it's been done so you can just yank the external drives out in the middle of a transfer without faults and so on - not likely..).

So it's much better to find the program that's causing it with process explorer.

 

ok, this is what i see. When i attempt to safely eject the drive, i get these 2 warnings. What do I have to do now?

 

Well, it's a.. the system process, really. pid4. I think process explorer will list what it is.

But it's something the explorer launched, one of the exclusive system-services. Could be a backup routine, could be an autorun launched every time the disk is inserted, could be an indexer, or for example Windows creating restore points.

 

Yes, stop avoiding process explorer. It will not bite you.

It could be a shell extension, check for explorer plugins.