Vista + External HDD = Disaster in Waiting

Ive had this 160 gb western digital HDD for over two months, from backing up all my data on xp to dropping some of it on vista, but for some reason or another, vista really hates to release the drive for me to safely remove. How do i know?

1. In xp, when i safely removed the Ex HDD, it stopped the disc from spinning so i could remove it. In vista, the disk continues to spin even when it tells me its safe to remove. This cause that HDD kill sound that i hate to hear.

2. I wasnt about two weeks ago, but now, i get a message telling me vista found problems on the drive. This is a new drive! I've safely removed it everytime and i really havent put anything on it from since i got rid of xp. This problem occured because i've been disconnecting it without it actually stopping the disc from spinning!

So, what can i do? I dont believe the exhdd came with drivers (i need to go home to look), and i really dont want to loose all my data, but it'd take around 14 dvd's to reback everything up!

 

Are you giving the HD enough time to release all of the files? It could be there are temp files still open that Vista is referencing.

Generally it should be safe to cut the power to an HD. The drive should have enough technology in it to protect itself in the event of interrupted power. That "kill sound" is just the heads parking.

When I move USB sticks between XP and Vista, Vista always *****es about the stick needing to be scanned.

 

If I leave my WD external HD connected, Vista a tries to runs a chkdsk on it every time I boot. Very annoying.

 

Stopping the disk from spinning is very unusual for an external hard disk when doing a "safely remove". Maybe it's very new with some sort of power saving features? If so, then that's handled by a driver which may not be installed/available for Vista yet.

Just make sure that before you unplug the disk that you do the "Safely Remove", and wait for it to tell you that it's OK to remove it. You should be fine if you do that.

Edit: Also make sure that you don't move the drive around for a few seconds after to turn it off/unplug it. Give the disk time to spin down.

 

I have a My Book, not sure if that's what you have. I got a Vista driver from WD website, but it doesn't work too well, so I resorted to shutdown the computer everytime I disconnect. If you push on the button at the front for a few seconds it will power off too.

 

have you actually let it run a chkdsk once? if you keep canceling it maybe that's why vista keeps trying to chkdsk it everytime it gets detected.

Whenever I get the error about being unable to remove a certain drive because it's in used, I sleep the computer, unplug the drive, and wake the computer. better to be safe than sorry. Don't hibernate though, it takes longer and I have gotten 2 BSODs when hibernating with external drives plugged in. It certainly freaked me out.

 

I'm not sure if making it sleep is any safer than unplugging it. The point of "safely remove" is to make sure that the disk cache has been flushed to the disk. I'm not sure if sleeping causes the disk cache to be flushed.

 

It's probably better to shut down rather than sleep if you cant safely remove, but sleep is much quicker. What I really want is that the disk is not spinning or in use when I unplug the external drive, and sleep does the job.

 

Sleep is much quicker because it does not to many things that a normal shutdown would do. I'm looking for information in this, but it's completely possible that one of the things it doesn't do is flush the disk cache. In that case, putting it to sleep and pulling the drive gives you no extra safety at all than if you just pulled the disk while the system was awake.

"Safely remove" has nothing to do with spinning down the disk, and on most drives that disk is always spinning until you unplug it.

 

On my other drive (none WD, it was something else, it ended up crashes after a year of dropping and abuse), the disk fully stopped before removing it in xp after clicking safe remove, i cant remember if it did for the WD drive as it was only used on xp for about two days

 

This thread struck me a kind of odd. I've unplugged/plugged the MyBook in and out of machines running both vista32 vista64 and XP without any waiting for anything and haven't had any issues, no drivers required either.

One thing I do find odd though is that in vista I cant seem to defrag the drive. Even when I do a rclick\properties on the drive it starts the defrag on the C drive.

 

Yea I did let it complete the first time. A day or so later I had the drive connected again during boot and Vista tried to check it again. I dunno, I'm always switching this drive between my Vista notebook and my office XP machines, so maybe that has something to do with it.

As far as removing external drives, I rarely do the "safely remove" routine. I just wait until file operations stop, close any windows to the drive, and yank it. Not that I recommend this practice.

 

This might answer your question

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1547

 

Good ol' Microsoft...
It looks as if in Redmond they develop their software on a single disk, single partition and no peripherals attached, especially of the USB kind.

 

thats just the way vista does defrag fella, it defrags all the drives when you go to defrag, and starts with c, i noticed that when trying the same !