Vista wont let me remove my external hdd?

I have a toshiba 250gb usb powered external. When i plug it in it works fine. but when i try to click the safely remove hardware i get an error message.

Windows cant stop your Generic volume device because it is in use.

the only things saved on the drive so far is some movies, songs, pictures, and a couple games. none of them are open or running, so why am i getting this message? and how do i remove this drive safely.

please help me out guys.

 

I also get this problem and it is very annoying. I think it is background processes rummaging through your external drive.

The only totally safe way to do the removal is to shut the computer down but, after I have told Vista a couple of times that I want to remove the HDD (which should make sure than any file writes are completed) I then pull the plug. So far, I've never had a data corruption problem.

It might be my imagination, but this problem may be less with SP1.

John

 

well im pretty sure i have sp1. is there any way around this problem? how can i figure out what is still running?

 

It could be tied to something like the indexing service.

 

You might be able to figure out what's going on by using Performance Monitor (Start > run > perfmon) and then clicking on the disk activity graph. This appears to list the active disk access processes.

However, I have just tied this with an external HDD and it is not listing the external logical drives as letters. I am seeing things like C:3\Windows. In my case DkService.exe is busy accessing what I think is the external partitions. this is part of Diskeeper (which I have) deciding to do something I haven't intentionally asked it to do.

EDIT: Diskeeper had a default to automatically defrag attached storage. I turned this off. However, there were still processes called "system" which were accessing the HDD. Something was still blocking safe removal so I just waited until there was no write activity and pulled the plug. It looks as if I was wrong in thinking that SP1 brought improvements.

John

 

This has also happened to my external since XP and I think its only a 1 out of 100 chance I get the "Remove Safely" confirmation box. Any help would be truly appreciated as I don't want to screw up the data on my external.

 

yea this is pretty ridiculous. i think later im gonna try giving toshiba a call and see if they know whats going on.

but if anyone else had this problem please let us know how u get around it.

 

I find "right-click -> Eject" followed by "right-click -> Safely Remove" in the Computer window to be pretty effective.

 

can u please explain this a little more? i opened up My Computer and right clicked in the external but there is no eject option, just the safely remove option. which gives the sames results.

 

anyone else?

 

Its most likely the indexing service, system restore or superfetch. Try temp disabling one at a time and see what happens.

EDIT: Could also be a third party defrag program, if you have one installed.