USB drive are not allowed to be` safely disconnected in vista prem

[Guest]

I have 2 usb external drives, Iomega and Acomdata. Both are formatted ntfs
but when I connect them to Vista premium machine they could not be safely
removed though no application is using them. It happoens to both a toshiba
laptop and a desktop ruuning vista.
I tried to just plug them in without doing anything and still get the same
message "could disconnect because an application is using it". I wait for
hours and still nothing.
I do not have any problem with them in windows xp or linux.
Also if i format them using a vista machine i could never safely disconnect
it even if i wait a whole day after it finished formatting.

 

[Dave T.]

I have 2 usb external drives, Iomega and Acomdata. Both are formatted ntfs
but when I connect them to Vista premium machine they could not be safely
removed though no application is using them. It happoens to both a toshiba
laptop and a desktop ruuning vista.
I tried to just plug them in without doing anything and still get the same
message "could disconnect because an application is using it". I wait for
hours and still nothing.
I do not have any problem with them in windows xp or linux.
Also if i format them using a vista machine i could never safely disconnect
it even if i wait a whole day after it finished formatting.

My external drive is the same way as long as the drive window is open in
either explorer or my computer. Close the window and use the disconnect
icon in the task bar and see if that helps. This is what I have to do.

 

[Guest]

It may be Windows indexing that is using the drives.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, froy02.

Run Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc). Right-click on each drive and choose
Properties. Is there a Policies tab? If so, you can choose between
Optimize for quick removal or Optimize for performance. Choose quick
removal.

When optimized for performance, Vista caches "writes" to the device, and
worries that data "in the pipeline" might be lost if the device is
unexpectedly unplugged. But when we optimize for quick removal, Vista takes
a few extra seconds to close the cache after each write, thus clearing the
pipeline, so that nothing gets lost on a quick disconnect.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta 2 in Vista Ultimate x64)