Hey All,

Don't know if Im being real stoopid, but it seems that everytime Im in a hurry and need to eject the USB hardrive from my laptop, I get the "sorry, the deice cannot be ejected blah blah blah message. Try again later!! TRY AGIAIN LATER?? It's 4 o'clock in the frigging morning-YOU TRY AGAIN LATER, Im OFF TO BED! End up yanking the thing out, which cant be good for it...

Khow all the stuff about making sure any doccos/files that are open from the hardive are closed, but why does this inability to eject happen all the time-or when you least need it to anyway?

After a few years of this problem the time has come to demand my freedom! or any help would be nice too...

cheers,

W

well ... in case of XP

including running indexing services ..

and/or used documents .... the OS take sometime Loooooooooooooong time

to unlock thoose files

just poke the head at the cancel button an rop it out ;-))

Plug your USB HD an then go to Control Panel > Device Manager and see the Hard drives. Double click on your USB drive and then go to policy tab or something like that. Choose the option to allow quick removal (turn off cache). If you want performance then choose the other option but you will need to use the removal icon and wait...

Hope this helps.

Edited August 31, 200520 yr by phastmike

Ive followed those steps thanks phastmike, but when I clicked the policies tab, the box for "Opimize for quick removal" was already checked...Does this mean I can ignore the "safely remove hardware" icon (that appears in my system tray every time I plug the thing in) and just pull the thin out?

Dosn't seem to make sense though, as sometimes when clicking the safely remove icon, I can "now safely remove..." If by having the above box checked doesn't that negate the need to even follow the safely remove procedure??

the more I understand about these things, the less I wanna know about them!

Should be okay.

When USB storage devices were first available, windows used to speed up the apparant speed of them by using delayed writes - ie your software (and you) think that the data has already been written to the drive. In actual fact, the data was still waiting to be written to the drive (and was sitting in a chunk of memory). This caused a problem if you yanked out the drive before that delayed write had finished.

Now, XP by default does not use this delayed write. So as long as you have finished your writing to the usb drive, you can quite happily rip it out withou fear of data loss.

As spog said, you can remove the device if you are not writing or reading from it.

In order to get the system to not give you that message " device in use, try again later" .... just shut down all your windows. It should then let you remove it.

In the industry, USB is considered 'hot swappable'. So it is designed for insertion and removal while the power is up. This is in contrast to say your monitor. You would never unplug that while power is on. That could destroy circuits and mean a trip to the PC tech for repair.

It should be no problem to unplug it without using the removal icon. If you data is really important and you are afraid then close all windows and try again. If this don't work and you are in a hurry then just shutdown the computer

Normally when you use small capacity hard drives this is not a problem but with high capacity ones then windows o.s. gets a little wicked. M$...

No problem when not reading or writing...remove away!!

Thanks for all of your inputs...helped demystify something that was really quite simple all along...easy when you know how eh!

Happy pulling !

W.