Safely Eject Flash drive or External HDD

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I am running Win7 Ultimate on an ASUS N50Vc.

I use external HDDs (USB/eSATA) to store backups and access data and also have a number of various sized flash drives, including several U3 drives.

When I want to eject the drives I always use the Safely Eject Hardware command (apart from the U3’s which have their own eject mechanism on the Launchpad) and have been doing this since XP.

However I have noticed with Win7, I get a message stating that the drive is “not removeable” and therefore cannot be stopped.

Is this a feature of Win7, or is there a driver I don’t have that I should?

These same drives eject flawlessy using the same process on XP and Vista…

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I would start by checking for updated drives for all the drives. I use a Seagate FreeDesk Go portable 1 TB Ext Drive and never get such a warning. I have both hot installed/uninstalled the ext drive as well as used the Safely Remove Hardware icon and have had no problems with the drive or getting unexplained warnings. Drivers would be the easiest and quickest to check.

There have been some examples of hardware that works fine in XP and Vista that just has problems in Win 7, not many in my opinion, but some. In my experience hardware that had problems in Win 7 also had problems with Vista. Generally I lost some functionality because the hardware manufacturer decided not to write new drivers for Win 7.

I hope this helps.

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Is this a feature of Win7, or is there a driver I don’t have that I should?

These same drives eject flawlessy using the same process on XP and Vista…

Windows 7 is more strict about checking for usage. Do you have Windows Explorer running when you try to “eject” the drive?

Joe

--Joe

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I use USB Disk Ejector on my Windows 7 netbook but I have no hints for an eSATA connection other than checking the properties of the drive in Device Manager, you may be able to modify the settings to allow Windows to release it.

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I use USB Disk Ejector on my Windows 7 netbook but I have no hints for an eSATA connection other than checking the properties of the drive in Device Manager, you may be able to modify the settings to allow Windows to release it.

This is a cool wee app! Thanks.

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This is a problem that does not require third party software. It is Uncle Billy’s issue and I can find no help on Microsoft’s site. It should work as Microsoft suggests: Close all windows and use the Safely remove hardware sys-tray applet. Or open explorer, right click and then eject — but them ain’t always present. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just does not.

It happens on “pure bread” externals I own — Passport drives (usb2) — and on a Generic shell (usb3) with a spare sata drive in it.

You could put the computer to sleep and unplug it, but that takes too long! Worse you can shut down. Unplugging it will lead to file corruption and the need to reformat — eventually. You may get away with that a few times.

Here is how I get it done without rebooting.
Try it the Microsoft way as stated above and in other posts. If that fails — try this:
Open Computer management and then Disk Management.
Locate the disk (0, 1, 2, 3, etc.) bearing the name of the desired ejectee
Right click on the Disk — not on the partition!
Select offline from the menu –> wait for the drive to go offline
The use safely remove to eject the drive — note the name is now different –> mine show as “external hdd”
Eject and Unplug it. I have moved it on an XP machine (USB1) and a Windows 8 (USB3) without problems after doing this:

HOWEVER, When I reconnect it to the original Win 7 system (USB 2) it shows as offline,
Go back to Disk Management and set it to online — back to normal.

I suspect it has to do with the library feature in Windows 7.

Good luck — happy computing.

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Try right-clicking the drive in Explorer and clicking Eject. If Explorer has the drive open it will close it and allow the eject. If that doesn’t work, try using the Process Monitor tool from Sysinternals, it should tell you who has files open on that drive (it could be an over-zealous anti-virus scanner); you can then stop that process so that you can eject the drive.

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Windows 7 is more strict about checking for usage. Do you have Windows Explorer running when you try to “eject” the drive?

Joe

Sometimes I do still have Explorer open, but I’m always sure to make sure the focus is on another drive than the USB (U3 drives can be pretty fussy about this, so I have got into the habit)

Try right-clicking the drive in Explorer and clicking Eject. If Explorer has the drive open it will close it and allow the eject. If that doesn’t work, try using the Process Monitor tool from Sysinternals, it should tell you who has files open on that drive (it could be an over-zealous anti-virus scanner); you can then stop that process so that you can eject the drive.

Bingo! right-clicking the drive in Explorer and clicking Eject does the trick. Give that man a beer!

Still not clear on why Safely Remove doesn’t work though

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