USB Drive Cannot be Stopped Right Now

[perickson]

I have 4 different Dell Optiplex computers running Windows 2000 that I
use as servers and back up daily using 3 different models of external
USB hard drives. When I use the icon in the System Tray to try to stop
the drives to disconnect them, I ALWAYS get the message,"The device
generic volume cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device
again later."

Waiting until later doesn't help. I finally just disconnect the drives,
but then get a repeated warning message that I should have stopped the
drive first and "Delayed write failed: Windows was unable to save all
the data for the file Device\HarddiskVolume4\$Mft. The data has been
lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware
or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere." I then
end up rebooting the machines to stop the error messages.

I shut off indexing and disabled write caching for the external drives,
but that didn't seem to have any affect. Why would I get the "Delayed
write failed" error if write caching is disabled? It's particularly
odd that I used to be able to stop the drives most of the time, but for
the last couple of months it always fails even though I can't think of
anything I changed.

I tried a free utility called Filemon and it showed a program called
IAP.EXE writing to the USB drive every couple of minutes. Supposedly
this is part of Dell OpenManager, but I couldn't figure out how to
disable it.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[Eric Gisin]

I have 4 different Dell Optiplex computers running Windows 2000 that I
use as servers and back up daily using 3 different models of external
USB hard drives. When I use the icon in the System Tray to try to stop
the drives to disconnect them, I ALWAYS get the message,"The device
generic volume cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device
again later."

You can try to dismount the volume manually.
Either "chkdsk /f u:" or "fsutil volume dismount u:".
If neither work, you have to nuke IAP.
It might show up under Admin Tools / Services.

 

[Peter]

I tried a free utility called Filemon and it showed a program called

IAP.EXE writing to the USB drive every couple of minutes. Supposedly
this is part of Dell OpenManager, but I couldn't figure out how to
disable it.

Disable IAP service.

 

[MB]

Microsoft really has to get it together in regards to firewire/USB
external hard drive handling. I get your problem a lot (and more).

In fact, I've been getting this problem ever since I started using
firewire drives with Windows 2000 and now, even with XP SP2, the
problems are still there.

In my opinion, Windows is not that dependable when it comes to external
hard drives -- USB2 or firewire. The patch from MS doesn't help either!

This is a pain for me in particular because I do a lot of video editing,
and working directly on a firewire drive would be great giving the
ability to conveniently take your work from one PC to another. Lots of
video editing courses running Macs, do this as a norm and on a daily
basis, often giving students their own firewire drive for editing exercises.

However, I've never ever been able to do this with XP, without crashing
a lot or a delayed write error (or a few other interesting hiccups). I
personally don't recommend using firewire/USB for mission critical
stuff, I only recommend them for file transfers between PC's of for
backup. I just don't trust writing to them directly, I'll back up using
GHOST first to my internal IDE drive, then I'll do a file copy to my
firewire. Longer process but safer.

I really hope that Windows Vista fixes all this, it's really a pity and
keeps Windows from gaining popularity in multimedia/video broadcast
applications. It winds up being too buggy for most using external drives
(and for video editing external drives wind up being used a lot for one
reason or another).

You really think by XP SP2 and with the increasing popularity of
external hard drives that Microsoft would have fixed up these issues.



Marco

 

[Rod Speed]

Microsoft really has to get it together in regards to firewire/USB
external hard drive handling. I get your problem a lot (and more).

In fact, I've been getting this problem ever since I started using
firewire drives with Windows 2000 and now, even with XP SP2, the
problems are still there.

In my opinion, Windows is not that dependable when it comes to
external hard drives -- USB2 or firewire. The patch from MS doesn't
help either!
This is a pain for me in particular because I do a lot of video
editing, and working directly on a firewire drive would be great
giving the ability to conveniently take your work from one PC to another. Lots
of
video editing courses running Macs, do this as a norm and on a daily
basis, often giving students their own firewire drive for editing
exercises.
However, I've never ever been able to do this with XP, without
crashing a lot or a delayed write error (or a few other interesting hiccups).
I
personally don't recommend using firewire/USB for mission critical
stuff, I only recommend them for file transfers between PC's of for
backup. I just don't trust writing to them directly, I'll back up
using GHOST first to my internal IDE drive, then I'll do a file copy
to my firewire. Longer process but safer.

I really hope that Windows Vista fixes all this, it's really a pity
and keeps Windows from gaining popularity in multimedia/video
broadcast applications. It winds up being too buggy for most using
external drives (and for video editing external drives wind up being
used a lot for one reason or another).

You really think by XP SP2 and with the increasing popularity of
external hard drives that Microsoft would have fixed up these issues.

It can take some time to get some problems fixed,
particularly if they are only seen in some situations.