Cannot safely remove portable hard drive

I'm having trouble of safely removing my portable hard drive, i currently using Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit. I don't wanna just plug it out. Help please.

 

I would shut down windows and disconnect it after, I guess that would automatically unplug it, I've never lost data in this way.
Or it could be that something inside your HDD is being use by windows, then you should kill it in the task manager.

But I am not an expert, I may be wrong.

 

windows will not lot you dismount/eject a devices that has open file handles or pending i/o.

Are you running any antivirus, etc, anything that might be accessing that device in the background?

 

To be honest there is no danger just unplugging. I've never safely removed any USB devices.

 

As long as you're not writing data to the drive when you unplug, it should be fairly safe. Shutting down/putting the computer to sleep to unplug is a way to do a hard "eject" if you don't want to just pull the plug. Killing the process accessing the drive will also solve the problem. Some media players like to access external devices to look for media files...

 

ryandolph25 I ALWAYS use safely eject, first I close all applications that may be trying to access it. Once in a while I have to go to the systray icon and click eject a second time.
IF the issue persits, you may want to connect the device - open device manager - properties - policies - then change the removal policy.

 

Windows says a lot of times that your external HDD is safe to disconnect and if you do right after the message you hear the drive spin-down cause you just cut the power while the drive was still spinning. If you don't unplug it right away and you wait like 5 to 6 seconds after the message is first displayed and you can hear the HDD powering off and there's no spin-down noise when you unplug it. Now that'd be the right procedure to unplug it.

Just like the progress bar when using a usb flash drive, the progress bar advances to like 90% in two seconds and then it just sits there for like a few good minutes till it'll finally reach 100% and estimated time is just a toy to keep you busy because it doesn't actually estimate anything. Or it prolly takes more time to estimate than to actually copy whatever is up for copying. Macs don't do that, It's one thing I like about them.

 

Some new files adding to the drive lately? Some file format that Windows has a tough time to appoint a corresponding app to access?

cheers ...

 

If you eject it from Explorer, it will tell you it's still busy, but you can ask it to eject anyway, and then it will tell you that it's safe. The only danger of unplugging it is file loss if something was still being written.

 

If this is a drive that you plan on connecting and removing fairly frequently, you can bypass the Safely Remove Hardware step in Device Manger.

With the external HDD connected:
Open Device Manager > Disk Drives > highlight the drive in question > right click "properties" > Policies > Quick Removal

What this does is disable write caching to that drive. So, any write operations are handled real time, rather than buffered to the HDD's cache for writing at a later time. This can give a tiny hit in performance, but will allow you to safely remove without having to "safely remove".

I do it for my externals only because I'm just too lazy and don't like getting the message that it cannot be removed. Of course, it can be removed... yank!

 

It honestly feels like a nagger when it does that.
So I just yank it out. LOL.
(just make sure nothing is visibly in progress ie. file transfers)

 

I can't even click the safely remove devices from the notification area and even in the devices and printers in the control panel pane.. and no eject context menu appears when i do right click in the removable device.
Yes, i do wait for any processes related to my external hdd to end before i unplug it so i think it's safe to remove it even without the safe removal.

 

I just wait for the activity light on my external to quit flashing, never used eject or safely remove, and never had a problem.

 

I would recommend running SFC.exe
Here is a good tutorial How to use the System File Checker tool to troubleshoot missing or corrupted system files on Windows Vista or on Windows 7