G
Guest
I'm having a serious problem removing an external USB hard drive (Maxtor
5000XT, 250GB drive). Having said that, I have read through all of the
postings for this subject matter and have not found any one particular
problem and/or fix that is quite like the problem I'm having. My problem is
that I can NEVER get the Safely Remove Hardware utility to confirm that it is
safe to remove the device. Try after try after try (sometimes 2+ hours
apart) only results in the message :
"Problem Ejecting 5000XT USB Drive
The device 'Generic volume' cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the
device again later."
As one person reported, on Maxtor drives, try multiple times to remove the
device. This I've tried and it still doesn't work. I've also tried changing
the caching options in the Policy Tab of the Drive Properties and this
doesn't seem to bring any better results. Lastly, I've made sure that there
are no (known) applications running at the time I attempt to remove the USB
device by closing all apps as well as any S/W running in the notification
area (e.g. virus s/w, desktop search engines, pest monitoring s/w, etc. etc.
Having said this, I do notice that somebody or something is accessing my
drive periodically because I can see the access lamp flicker on and off every
so often. I don't have a clue what could be causing this activity however I
suppose it's feasible that the Safely Remove Hardware utility thinks that the
disk is still in use.
Strangely enough, a few weeks ago I must have disconnected the drive before
a write operation had completed. This lead to an error message indicating
that the data was corrupt (as it rightfully should have). It was impossible
to remove the corrupt file because windows reported that it could not delete
a file that was still OPEN. I gave up after a while and reformatted the
partition again. Still, the drive kept giving me problems and wouldn't pass
an error check from the Disk Management utility in Windows. It appeared that
not only the partition was corrupted but the entire disk volume. In response
to this, I removed all partitions on the hard drive, created new partitions
and formatted each one as FAT32 partitions (using PartitionMagic 7.0). Error
checked each FAT32 partition and no errors were reported. Tried converting
each FAT32 partition into NTFS partitions with great difficulties. Two out
of the three partitions would convert and the third partition failed. Error
checked the two NTFS partitions and the error check revealed two corrupted
files with the message "1611 Bad System Files 9(48) and 11(48). This meant
nothing to me but I somehow got the idea that I'd have to do a Low Level
Format on the disk before the problem was going to disappear. Well, Maxtor
informed me that they could not provide me with a LL formatting utility so I
wiped the disk clean again and have since learned to live with the three
FAT32 partitions which seem to work O.K.
Sorry about the long explanation above but I thought it might have something
to do with the inability to remove the USB drive with the Safely Remove
Hardware utility.
Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. By the way, I'm using
a Dell Dimension 8200 machine running Windows XP Home with SP2 installed.
5000XT, 250GB drive). Having said that, I have read through all of the
postings for this subject matter and have not found any one particular
problem and/or fix that is quite like the problem I'm having. My problem is
that I can NEVER get the Safely Remove Hardware utility to confirm that it is
safe to remove the device. Try after try after try (sometimes 2+ hours
apart) only results in the message :
"Problem Ejecting 5000XT USB Drive
The device 'Generic volume' cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the
device again later."
As one person reported, on Maxtor drives, try multiple times to remove the
device. This I've tried and it still doesn't work. I've also tried changing
the caching options in the Policy Tab of the Drive Properties and this
doesn't seem to bring any better results. Lastly, I've made sure that there
are no (known) applications running at the time I attempt to remove the USB
device by closing all apps as well as any S/W running in the notification
area (e.g. virus s/w, desktop search engines, pest monitoring s/w, etc. etc.
Having said this, I do notice that somebody or something is accessing my
drive periodically because I can see the access lamp flicker on and off every
so often. I don't have a clue what could be causing this activity however I
suppose it's feasible that the Safely Remove Hardware utility thinks that the
disk is still in use.
Strangely enough, a few weeks ago I must have disconnected the drive before
a write operation had completed. This lead to an error message indicating
that the data was corrupt (as it rightfully should have). It was impossible
to remove the corrupt file because windows reported that it could not delete
a file that was still OPEN. I gave up after a while and reformatted the
partition again. Still, the drive kept giving me problems and wouldn't pass
an error check from the Disk Management utility in Windows. It appeared that
not only the partition was corrupted but the entire disk volume. In response
to this, I removed all partitions on the hard drive, created new partitions
and formatted each one as FAT32 partitions (using PartitionMagic 7.0). Error
checked each FAT32 partition and no errors were reported. Tried converting
each FAT32 partition into NTFS partitions with great difficulties. Two out
of the three partitions would convert and the third partition failed. Error
checked the two NTFS partitions and the error check revealed two corrupted
files with the message "1611 Bad System Files 9(48) and 11(48). This meant
nothing to me but I somehow got the idea that I'd have to do a Low Level
Format on the disk before the problem was going to disappear. Well, Maxtor
informed me that they could not provide me with a LL formatting utility so I
wiped the disk clean again and have since learned to live with the three
FAT32 partitions which seem to work O.K.
Sorry about the long explanation above but I thought it might have something
to do with the inability to remove the USB drive with the Safely Remove
Hardware utility.
Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. By the way, I'm using
a Dell Dimension 8200 machine running Windows XP Home with SP2 installed.