Windows 7 - Quick Macrium Free question

I just did a full backup of c: using macrium free, and all went well.

The image was stored to an external "My Book" drive and after closing macrium upon the image creation, I can't seem to safely eject the external. I get the following message:



I'm sure a reboot would allow me to eject it, but i'm curious what the proper way would be.

edit:
Macrium is fully closed
I don't see any processes running that are macrium related with "show processes from all users" used

Neither Process Monitor or Process Explorer returned any results when filtering for the USB drive letter...

Event Viewer logged the following:



Nothing critical here, just more curious as to the why/how/learning parts of this scenario

You're lucky I can't even get my (paid) Macrium to backup and verify (which is the critical step) any image. If the image doesn't pass verification then the image isn't any good.

The reason you are getting that message is because the external My Book is still using the computer. You can do one of 2 things, turn the My Book off using the tab on the back (right above the USB cable) or you can go to the right corner in the notifications bar (over where the clock and stuff is) and there should be a tab that says "safely remove hardware"; click on that and you can unplug it. It will reinstall the driver the next time you reconnect it. Personally I just shut mine off. You can also power down (turn off) the PC then turn the My Book off using the tab above the USB. That keeps the driver installed. With this method you just turn it back on before the next reboot.

sorry to go off topic per original op but regarding verify image I had a combination of 1gb and 2gb sticks of XMS2 ram and experienced no problems with any ram checking programs or within windows but it wasnt until i dropped back to just using the 4x1gb sticks that Macrium would successfully backup and verify

My conclusion is that this combination of sticks on my system possibly subtly changed the timings and produced a very small amount of allowable and tolerable errors but for the purposes of Macrium which appears to be very sensitive to errors this setup was not good enough ?

personally I wonder if we should be recommending Macrium as a ram checking procedure

have you tried running process explorer from sys internals and looking for PID 4 ?

the 4 denotes a group of process that have SYSTEM integrity. If you add the "Integrity" column, you would then see the integrity level of the processes in that group.

I'm running 4 - 1GB sticks. I pulled 2 out and ran the original ones that came with the PC, didn't fix the problem. I also ran Memtest on them, no problems showed up. The ran a stress test on the system and nothing. I also used the Windows memory test, it passed. You are right Macrium is a very sensitive software, that's why I chose it. Like I said if you can't trust the image don't use it. One of my files has got to have a checksum issue. When I get time I'm going to run "Exact" on each file.

Hey icky thanks for that link, they have some awesome stuff there. I'm going to see if I can find something to fix this checksum issue.
Thanks again
PS didn't mean to hijack Ageeb's post.

This is something I get from time to time and not related to Macrium. I haven't figured a way to release the drive and have no idea why the message says "in use".

If I absolutely must, I do a restart since logoff/logon often won't release the drive. After the restart "safely remove" is fine.

The problem is with your My Book, not the Macrium. Are you using the "Smartware"? If you are, it monitors everything going on with your PC, it does a continuous backup of your personal files. I don't use it, in fact I hate it. Smartware it's not!!

For what ever reason the My Book, just by being ON, makes it "in use". I would suggest going to the WD forum ( Western Digital Community - Western Digital Community )and ask there how to deal with it. I don't turn my external drive on unless I'm going to do a backup.

I regularly use external drives connected via USB and this continues to be a problem.

And sometimes, the clean shutdown simply will not work. Something is using the drive and won't release it.

What I've found always works is gracefully shutting down the PC with the drive still running. That will clear any cache of writes to the drive. Then, turn off the drive.

While this sounds like it could be a problem, I've done this LOTS of times now, and never once encountered a problem with the drive when using it again. Yeah, sometimes I get the "needs to scan" popup when it sees the drive again, but even when I do run the scan (which I don't anymore), it never finds any errors.