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Cannot stop Ext. HD

U

UnlimitedMP

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 8, 2004
Messages
1,946
I did a search and couldnt find an answer.

I have a WD 120 gig ext hd. When I went to safely remove hardware, I tried to stop it, but it said it cannot be stopped at that time. I tried again later many times. It still did not let me stop it.

Eventually, I just turned it off. Any advice to get it to safely remove? Will I lose/corrupt much data?
 
While I do not have a good answer for why you couldn't stop it, I can say that as long as write caching is disabled (which it should be) then you will not lose data by simply turning it off, presuming that are no open handles on the drive. Windows XP by default does write through on external drives. Windows 2000 ignores the WRITE_THROUGH flag, so you may have data loss, or worse corruption, if cached writes are still in the buffer when you turn the drive off and you are running 2000.

As for why you couldn't stop it, be sure that nothing is accessing the drive when you try to stop it.
 
Something I've noticed with Windows is that occasionally explorer.exe just won't stop "accessing" a file or directory. Many a time I've tried to delete files or directories, with no windows open to them, not shared on the network, through even DOS, and I still get a "in use" error. The only solution I've found is to kill explorer.exe in Task Manager and then start it again- not a pretty solution, but, eh, it works.
 
mpeg4v3 said:
Something I've noticed with Windows is that occasionally explorer.exe just won't stop "accessing" a file or directory. Many a time I've tried to delete files or directories, with no windows open to them, not shared on the network, through even DOS, and I still get a "in use" error. The only solution I've found is to kill explorer.exe in Task Manager and then start it again- not a pretty solution, but, eh, it works.
Click to expand...
The best one is in windows 2000 when you're trying to delete a movie, and so you click on it and Media Player opens it in the sidebar and now you can't delete it. Wonder what they were thinking when they came up with that... :rolleyes:
 
I've had the same thing happen to me. :mad:

I thought it was the file indexing service.
If you figure it out let me know. I've just been removing the drive anyway.

 
Hm. Interesting and how odd.
I was using XP and nothing was writing nor were any windows open.

I'll try killing explorer next time this happens.
 
I usually reboot the machine and that takes care of the stuck external drive.
 
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