Cannot eject hard drive.

When i try to saefly remove my external hard drive i get the "cannot stop right now because something is using it"

anybody know how i can find out what is using it and how i can sort it?

Thanks!

You can try task manager to see if you can tell. It is a rather common problem. The easiest way is to shut down the computer, remove the HD and restart. Notice I said the easiest not the most desirable.

yea its a pain in the hole alright. thats what i have been doing.

would like to try find out how to eject it. thanks anyway.

anyone else got any ideas???

"Safe to remove" really means that all cached writes have been written to the disk. When I encounter the "cannot remove ..." situation, I ensure that no open applications are obviously using the disk and there is no disk activity, then simply disconnect. I have never lost any data on an external drive, memory card or thumb drive from doing this.

I have heard people say they never even bother to attempt the "safe eject" and just disconnect the device. I think that is going a bit too far and they may get burned by that procedure.

log of the desktop unplug drive log back in. :)