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Summary: Windows tries to prevent corruption by disallowing removal of USB devices that are "in use". Unfortunately it's not always obvious what "in use" means.
Well, windows certainly thinks that some program is attempting to access the USB drive. Since it's not guaranteed to be safe to remove a drive while it's in use, Windows tells you that you can't. The "wait until later" part is all about waiting until that program, whatever it is, is done with the drive. What program? Figuring that out is the trick... • Here's the message we're talking about:
This pops up if you attempt to "safely remove hardware" on an external USB flash or hard drive and Windows thinks that the drive is in-use by some program on your machine. It turns out that finding out what program that might be isn't particularly obvious, but we can go searching for clues. "It's difficult to predict what you'll find that might
have something open on your external drive."
Here's the approach I use. First, go download and run Process Explorer - the free Sysinternals utility from Microsoft. With Process Explorer running, use its Find menu, Find handle or DLL ... function, and search for \device\harddisk. You should get results similar to this:
You can see that the list includes several entries (yours will almost certainly be different). And it's not at all obvious which hard disk each line represents. However clues are here. In my case I looked down this list and realized that WS_10001.WMA, listed in the right hand column, is an audio file that I was just listening to. I had failed to close the audio player (mplayerc.exe, listed in the left hand column). I closed the player, and "Safely Remove Hardware" worked just fine. It's difficult to predict what you'll find that might have something open on your external drive. In my case it was simple, I'd been listening to an audio file that I immediately recognized. The clues you get might not be quite as obvious. In particular, check the list of programs you'll see on the right of your own search results list. See if any of those might have a reason to be accessing the USB drive. I'm guessing that some of the unexpected offenders you might find in that list include anti-virus programs who've started scanning the drive, anti-spyware tools doing the same, the Windows indexing service (you might need to turn off indexing of the external drive) and other tools that might try to automatically access hard drives that are found on your system. Related:
Article 12117 | Posted December 23, 2007 |
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Another useful feature of Process Explorer that you've pointed me to. Thanks. (I think I should take some time and just go through every menu choice and dialog box in that thing.)
In addition to "\device\harddisk", you may also want to search for "X:\" where "X:" is the drive letter of the USB drive.
Posted by: Ken B at December 27, 2007 11:01 AMI noticed, at the bottom of a Microsoft document, the author put a comment about using "unhooker" to close any handles on the removeable drive. It is free, donate if you want, and it works great! Just r-click on the drive in explorer, unhooker shows, select it, and select close handles. Done.
Posted by: Robert Petteway at December 28, 2007 06:16 PMI frequently have .doc files on a USB drive that I may have been editing. I use Word as my default editor for Outlook, also. I have found that I have to close Outlook in order for the "Safe to remove..." message returns. It took me awhile to find that one.
Posted by: Bill Holland at December 29, 2007 10:59 AMThanx Leo It was very good article.Now I am able to resolved the problem that I ever face.
Posted by: ashoka at January 1, 2008 06:07 AMre: using "unhooker" to close any handles on the removeable drive: Just r-click on the drive in explorer, unhooker shows, select it, and select close handles. cant find this and cant unplug my WD external drive. thanks 4 the help! Susan
Posted by: susan b at January 17, 2008 08:32 AMAlso there is another way of getting rid of this problem without any additional cliks - to use USB Safely Remove ( http://safelyremove.com ). It fully replaces native safely remove utility and allows to displays programs are locking the device. It's not free, but it's very handy when you use USB gadgets often
Posted by: WiseJoe at January 22, 2008 10:18 AM