USB ext hard drive can't shut down.

I've been having off and on problems lately so I've been doing some cleanup
& backup in case this thing crashes.

My latest is that when I click on the icon to "safely remove the hardware"
quite often get a msg that something else is running and it can't shut own
right now. So I have to shut down my laptop completely so it will stop/shut
off and I won't take a chance on messing it up and having it crash.

Any ideas ??? Thanks in advance for the help !

Bubey wrote:

> I've been having off and on problems lately so I've been doing some cleanup
> & backup in case this thing crashes.
>
> My latest is that when I click on the icon to "safely remove the hardware"
> quite often get a msg that something else is running and it can't shut own
> right now. So I have to shut down my laptop completely so it will stop/shut
> off and I won't take a chance on messing it up and having it crash.
>
> Any ideas ??? Thanks in advance for the help !
>

If the removal fails then someone still accesses the drive. This can
be something banal like an open Word document or an mounted
TrueCrypt container or some kind of monitoring tool like a virus
scanner.
A network share on the drive that has been used makes the removal
fail too.

By means of SysInternals ProcessExplorer you might be able to
discover which program holds an open handle to the drive. After
starting it go to 'Find' -> 'Find Handle or DLL', enter the drive
letter like X:\ or a part of the DOS device name like 'Harddisk3'
and search. You get the 'DOS device name' by means of my command
line tool ListDosDevices.

<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx>
<http://www.uwe-sieber.de/drivetools_e.html#listdosdevices>


Uwe