USB device won't stop

[Guest]

Hi everyone

I am using 1Gb USB flashdrive in Windows XP Professional.
When I want to remove it, I follow the rules and click "safely remove
hardware" menu in the taskbar, but when I try to stop USB Mass Storage Device
it ALWAYS says "The device ... cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the
device again later". It NEVER allows me to stop even if I don't
open/read/write the device.
This is strange because on my office computer it stops fine without any
problems.

It is not a big deal of course but I am just curious - is there any way to
fix it?

Thank you
Alex

 

[S.Sengupta]

Open device manager, under disk drives select your USB drive and under
policies you can select optimize for quick removal and this disables the
write cache for the drive.Does it help?

regards,
S.Sengupta[MS-MVP]

 

[Uwe Sieber]

I am using 1Gb USB flashdrive in Windows XP Professional.
When I want to remove it, I follow the rules and click "safely remove
hardware" menu in the taskbar, but when I try to stop USB Mass Storage Device
it ALWAYS says "The device ... cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the
device again later".

You could try my commandline tool RemoveDrive:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/removedrive.zip

removedrive x: -h

x: is the drive letter of your flash drive, -h let the
program show open handles to this drive.
This function requires admin previleges and unfortunally
it may freeze...

Let me know if it freezes, the we try something else...


Greetings from Germany

Uwe

 

[Uwe Sieber]

Open device manager, under disk drives select your USB drive and under
policies you can select optimize for quick removal and this disables the
write cache for the drive.Does it help?

No, this cannot help. Cache or not will not aviod the
removal. If there would be outstanding write operations,
Windows would flush the cache and give an OK. The only
reason to deny the removal is one or more open handles
to the drive.

Furthermore the policies 'Optimize for quick removal' and
'Optimize for performance' doesn't seem to have a direct
influence on XP's cache behavior. The latter enables the
user to format a removable drive with NTFS. And NTFS formatted
USB drives have a write cache while FAT formatted ones have
not.
The captions of the policies are misleading but appearently
everyone believes in them...


Greetings from Germany

Uwe

 

[S.Sengupta]

I think there is a tool,deveject.exe which can help.

http://www.jsifaq.com/SUBQ/tip8400/rh8496.htm

or,
ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/listings/0316-208.zip

For help, run deveject.exe /? in a command prompt.

regards,
S.Sengupta[MS-MVP]

 

[Uwe Sieber]

I think there is a tool,deveject.exe which can help.

http://www.jsifaq.com/SUBQ/tip8400/rh8496.htm

or,
ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/listings/0316-208.zip

For help, run deveject.exe /? in a command prompt.

No help for the problem. DevEject does nothing else then
the save removal of Windows. Furthermore it cannot remove
drives that have a drivetype DRIVE_FIXED and under XP it
always reports success even the removal faild because of
open handles because Microsoft has changed the result
behavior for the function CM_Request_Device_Eject.


Uwe

 

[S.Sengupta]

Hmm;that's really interesting.Thanks for the explanation.

regards,
S.Sengupta[MS-MVP]

 

[Guest]

Thanks Uwe

I'll try when I get home

Alex

You could try my commandline tool RemoveDrive:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/removedrive.zip

removedrive x: -h

x: is the drive letter of your flash drive, -h let the
program show open handles to this drive.
This function requires admin previleges and unfortunally
it may freeze...

Let me know if it freezes, the we try something else...


Greetings from Germany

Uwe

 

[Guest]

Hi Uwe

Nope. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. When I run it, it shows the message:
Removing Drive ...
and hangs up, waiting for something. It does not show list of handles or
anything.

And I still have no clue, what's wrong with my OS/USB configuration.

 

[gg]

first try closing everything: explorer programs, making sure nothing is
locking the drive or files on teh drive
then try again.

 

[Uwe Sieber]

Hi Uwe

Nope. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. When I run it, it shows the message:
Removing Drive ...
and hangs up, waiting for something. It does not show list of handles or
anything.

Hi Alex,

ok, then it runs into the freeze problem...

Let's try something else to discover who has an open
handle to your USB drive:

Get Sysinternals ProcessExplorer
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html
and my ListUsbDrives
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/listusbdrives.zip


Start ListUsbDrives, it shows somthing like this for each
USB drive:

MountPoint = U:\
Volume Name = VOYAGER1GB
Size = 991 MB
MultiReader = no
Drive Type = removable drive
DOS Device = \Device\Harddisk4\DP(1)0-0+f
Device Name = Corsair Flash Voyager
Serial = ---
USB Port = 3-2

We need the 'DOS Device' name for you drive. Then start the
ProcessExplorer. Ignore the initial message 'No symbols defined'.
Go to 'Find'->'Find Handle' and enter a unique part of your drive's
DOS Device name, e.g. 'disk4'. Click 'Search'.

Then it lists all processes that hold open handles to your drive.


Greetings from Germany

Uwe