Trouble closing USB drive

[Dave]

When I click on the USB drive icon to 'Safely remove USB mass storage
device' I get the message

"The device 'Generic volume' cannot be stopped now. Try stopping the
device again later"

This only seems to happen after I have deleted files from the drive.
Otherwise I get the usual 'safe to remove hardware' message.

Simply unplugging the device has so far not caused any problems, but I
don't like the risk. I assume it relates to a setting somewhere.

Can anybody suggest a solution?

Thanks
Dave

 

[Uwe Sieber]

When I click on the USB drive icon to 'Safely remove USB mass storage
device' I get the message

"The device 'Generic volume' cannot be stopped now. Try stopping the
device again later"

This only seems to happen after I have deleted files from the drive.
Otherwise I get the usual 'safe to remove hardware' message.

Simply unplugging the device has so far not caused any problems, but I
don't like the risk. I assume it relates to a setting somewhere.

Can anybody suggest a solution?

The ProcessExplorer is great for discovering which application
holds an open handle to a drive. Press Ctrl+F and enter the
drive letter like U:.
I've often seen that it cannot resolve drive letters, so you
have to search for the DOS device name of the drive, something
like \Device\Harddisk4\DP(1)0-0+11. A significant part like
'disk4' is good enough.

My commandline tool RemoveDrive can prepare drives for save
removal:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/removedrive.zip
If it fails it shows the DOS device name to search for in
the ProcessExplorer too.

But it happens that the ProcessExplorer cannot find open handles
because they are held by a process that is deeper in the system
than the ProcessExplorer can look. This is typical for anti virus,
anti spyware, anti anything software.

The XP indexing service can cause it on USB hard disks.

There are reports that a network share on an USB drive prevents
the removal. The share must be deleted then...


Uwe