windows 8 - How to safely eject 2nd HDD (internal)? Win 8.1

07
2014-07
  • Gondil

    Nowadays I got some problems with my 2nd HDD which i use just for storing data. It's not an external HDD, but it is inserted in HDD caddy(I replaced optical drive in my ThinkPad T400 with this caddy).

    Now I had problems with some bad sectors on my HDD but I have it just few months. I don't know, maybe it has bad blocks also before but now the problems with some data has occurred so I started to work on it. I had a thought, that maybe I damaged drive by not good handling with it.

    For example, I manually "opened" caddy and take away disk when laptop was running. But disk didn't do any actions at that time(I tried to check and there was no process which uses this disk). But, when I click on tray "Safely remove hardware and Eject Media" and choose HDD Toshiba ... pop-up appears with a message that it's not possible to eject drive because something is using the drive(but, in my opinion it isn't). When I remove HDD by "force" nothing happen, no soft fail or something like that. And when I put it back in, everything is OK. And when I want to eject it "safely"(using tray) it's no problem, yet.

    So got 2 questions:

    1. Can my handling (as manually ejecting HDD without previous "safely remove hardware") seriously damage my HDD causing around 14 GB of storage space are unusable?

    2. How can I safely remove HDD from caddy when my laptop is running and (in my opinion) nothing uses this drive?

    I'm ready to specify this problem by your questions.

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    windows 7 - Safe removal of USB mass storage device not possible
  • de1337ed

    I have a 1TB external hard drive. Whenever I try to safely remove it, it says that the device is still in use.

    I looked through all my processes and I can't find anything using the device. It's annoying since I always have to unplug the device, which I know is not good.

    I recently installed a clean version of Windows 7 and the problem still occurs. What could be the cause?


    • Related Answers
  • Bon Gart

    Have you tried changing the drive's specific policies tab to Quick Removal?

    enter image description here

    It would look something like that. Otherwise, are you certain Windows is not indexing the drive.

    And when you say "clean version of Windows 7" do you mean the ONLY things you have installed other than the OS are the hardware drivers? Or do you mean that you wiped and reinstalled Windows 7 and the drivers, and all the software you normally use?

  • newbie

    Try downloading unlocker from here and right click on drive and click on unlocker.Now choose kill all processes and then try to safely remove it

  • Loren Pechtel

    I've seen this before, it was caused by a task monitoring a directory for changes.

  • Freelanzer

    Usually it won't matter if you unplug your USB device when it's not performing data operations. However, if you really want to use the safely remove your device feature but it doesn't work, A tricky solution is available. You only need to end your explorer.exe process at windows task manager. Then at the time when explorer.exe is reloaded, you perform the safely remove.