Vista refuses to safely remove external usb hard drive - Roof Fiddler

I have no programs accessing anything on my external usb hd, and no explorer
windows or command prompts running. The activity light on the drive shows no
activity. When I click the "safely remove hardware" icon in the task tray
and click "safely remove usb mass storage device - drive (f:)" it says
immediately the external drive goes into a flurry of activity with its
activity light staying on almost constantly. Windows resource monitor shows
that svchost is the culprit, reading the drive at about 2MB/sec
continuously. Sysinternals process explorer confirms that nothing besides
activity continues for several minutes, then stops. If I try "safely remove
hardware" again, it again refuses, and goes into another flurry of disk
activity. The result is that I can't safely remove the device, unless I shut
down the machine first, which kind of defeats the point of usb drives being
hot pluggable. This is infuriating.

Vista refuses to safely remove external usb hard drive - Alexander Suhovey

Roof Fiddler,

I've seen this happening on XP too every now and then, so there's nothing
new in this behavior on Vista. Two ways I usually troubleshoot/workaround
this issue: configuring drive for quick removal and tracking down offending
process.

1. To configure drive for quick removal, Open Device Manager; expand "Disk
drives" node; double click drive in question; on the Policies tab make sure
file operations on the drive but will allow you to remove it at any moment
without even using (sometimes failing) "Safe Removal" function.

2. Two usual suspects that can keep your USB drive busy are System Restore
and Indexing. I'd check their settings to see if your system configured to
either create restore points for this drive or to index its contents for
instant search. Also, I'd find out exact instance of svchost that has
handles open to this drive and which services are running under this
instance. I use Sysinternals' handle.exe and built-in tasklist.exe
command-line utilities for this. First, you run

handle DRIVE:

to get PIDs of processes that have handles open on the drive. Then you can
run

tasklist /SVC /FI "PID eq PROCESS_ID"

where PROCESS_ID is the PID you've got from handle. If it's svchost that has
handles open, you'll get the list of services that run under this instance
of svchost.

To get friendly names of services, you can use sc.exe built-in utility:

sc qc SERVICE_NAME | find /i "DISPLAY_NAME"

where SERVICE_NAME is the name you've got from taskilst output.



Example:
======================8<========================
C:\>handle H:\

Handle v3.2
Copyright (C) 1997-2006 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

System             pid: 4       1C8:
H:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\$TxfLog\$TxfLogContainer00...
System             pid: 4       270:
H:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\$TxfLog\$TxfLog.blf
System             pid: 4       27C:
H:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\$TxfLog\$TxfLogContainer00...
System             pid: 4       288: H:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\$Txf
System             pid: 4       368: H:\System Volume
Information\{3808876b-c176-4e48-b7...
System             pid: 4       36C: H:\System Volume
Information\{477ccf48-a888-11db-b5...
svchost.exe      pid: 1148    5BC: H:\$Extend\$ObjId
svchost.exe      pid: 1148    5C4: H:\System Volume Information\tracking.log

C:\>tasklist /SVC /FI "PID eq 1148"

Image Name               PID              Services
=============== ========= =======================================
svchost.exe               1148             AudioEndpointBuilder, CscService,
EMDMgmt,
hidserv, Netman,
PcaSvc, SysMain,
TabletInputService,
TrkWks, UmRdpService,
UxSms,
WdiSystemHost, WPDBusEnum, wudfsvc

C:\>sc qc AudioEndpointBuilder | find "DISPLAY_NAME"
DISPLAY_NAME       : Windows Audio Endpoint Builder

C:\>sc qc CscService | find "DISPLAY_NAME"
DISPLAY_NAME       : Offline Files

C:\>sc qc EMDMgmt | find "DISPLAY_NAME"
DISPLAY_NAME       : ReadyBoost

C:\bin>
======================8<========================

Hope this helps,

--
Alexander Suhovey

Vista refuses to safely remove external usb hard drive - Uwe Sieber

This is a known bug in XP that seems to be still present in Vista.
When a save removal is tried Windows can send a message about that
and all processes that hold open but non essential handles should
close them now. But the indexing service doesn't care.

My commandline tool RemoveDrive can prepare a drive for save removal:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/removedrive.zip

Started with parameter -i it stops the indexing service for a moment.
Horrible workaround, but it works...
Sample:

removedrive u: -i

For stopping a service admin previleges are required.


Greetings from Germany

Uwe