I am so sick of external NTFS formatted disk drives (help forunmounting)

[Poutnik]

John McGaw posted Wed, 10 Jul 2013 11:42:02 -0400

If your computer is not
cooperating there is always the ultra-safe option of simply shutting the
computer down (not telling it to sleep or hibernate but truly shutting it
down), disconnecting the drive, and then restarting.

Possibly re-logging or explorer.exe restart could help at some cases.

 

[Mark Warner]

I *think* the hot-swapping is what is causing the problems, so,
I ask whether freeware exists to make pulling out an external
USB cable safer?

Doesn't Windows scold you when you do that?

 

[Mark Warner]

If your computer is
not cooperating there is always the ultra-safe option of simply shutting
the computer down (not telling it to sleep or hibernate but truly
shutting it down), disconnecting the drive, and then restarting.

That's what I have to do many times on my workplace XP machine.

 

[Paul]

As others have written, following the proper procedure is critical i.e.
telling the OS to make the drive safe for removal. If your computer is
not cooperating there is always the ultra-safe option of simply shutting
the computer down (not telling it to sleep or hibernate but truly
shutting it down), disconnecting the drive, and then restarting.
Personally, I've never had any difficulty with lost data from
disconnecting an external drive but I'm always meticulous about
following the recommended procedure.

Another option would be to "Optimize for safe removal", which
disables write caching. As long as the drive light is off
when you pull the cable, that might help improve the odds
of not damaging it. The two options are shown in this picture.
And the text underneath the options, explains how to work with
them safely. The "Quick Removal" is for impatient people

http://www.mydigitallife.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/usb-faster-performance.jpg

The options are not always available, and sometimes it's harder
to enable caching (the unsafe option) when you want it. Uwe's site
is a treasure trove, about stuff like this. It explains what
your options are.

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/drivetools_e.html#RemoveDrive

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

Paul

 

[DevilsPGD]

In the last episode of

David H. Lipman posted Wed, 10 Jul 2013 06:34:22 -0400



but is not NTFS since Vista a transactional file system ?
whould not be it at the worst the disk content is some seconds obsolete ?
Eventually to perform some rollback according to $Logfile ?

Cannot it by rather hardware issue than NTFS issue ?

BTW, AFAIK there is possibility to dsable caching
to set USB device for fast removal,
if performance drop does not matter.

Caching is disabled by default on every USB drive I've seen (although
not consistently for eSATA) -- The trick is to not enable caching unless
you can also manage to remove safely before pulling the plug.

You may still experience file-level corruption if you have software that
keeps it's database open and doesn't flush to disk until you instruct
it, but there's nothing the OS or filesystem can do about that that
works in all cases.

 

[Tommy]

Cary wrote:


Yanking the cable before stopping the device means you lose the cached
(unwritten) data. It does not mean the file system gets corrupted,
especially with NTFS which has a journaling system just for the
purpose of the drive suddenly losing power without any time for it to
flush (write) its cached data.

Doing great till I got to here ----->
If you could possibly "unflatterly" the next couple of lines - please )

Tommy

Not even the files that were left open

 

[H-Man]

Poutnik posted Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:47:17 +0200



P.S.>
I mean what happen if USB power goes down
in the middle of disk reading ?

Is it harmless to disk or not ?
does it have enoug reserve e.g. in capacitors
to at least park the head before transport ?

If I were a designer, I would do it so,
but is it reality ?

It is harmless to the disk as power outage is sensed the heads immediately
parked at highest priority. Happens in milliseconds.

 

[Darklight]

For the third time in my life (on multiple machines), I've had
NTFS formatted disk drives lose all their data, simply from
plugging and unplugging them into a PC.

Can someone tell me what on earth is going on to make them lose
their data - and - more importantly - how best to prevent the
hellacious recovery process (yes, I'm all too familiar with
Photorec and Recuva).

I *think* the hot-swapping is what is causing the problems, so,
I ask whether freeware exists to make pulling out an external
USB cable safer?

If you sick of ntfs formated external hard drives when you get one reformate
it!