thanks

but this is happening even with everything closed, as if something in the background is hanging on.

could it be your pagefile?

That demounting routine in XP is, indeed, very clunky. I have six externals connected, and, when I want to disconnect them, I run into the same problem, usually with just one or two of the drives. When this happens, I skp that drive, demount all the others, then, get stubbornly persistent with the remaining drive. If all else fails, I just go ahead and unplug the drive.

Al this dismounting does is assure that you aren't interrupting some bit of read/write on that drive (that could render it inaccessible by Windows). If the drive isn't spinning, the activity light isn't lit, then, you can really disconnect the drive anytime with little risk of damaging it or losing data.

How often have you lost power while working on your computer? It's happened to me several times. I didn't lose any data at all except for unsaved versions of whatever file I might have had open at the time.

Sometimes, if I'm running late in the morning and need to power down my machine, I'll just click the master surge protector switch. The only damage is that Windows wants to perform a scan of my discs because it "wasn't shut down properly" when I go to power back up. I hit a key to cancel the scan and move on as normal.

I'm not advocating that anyone get in the habit of shutting down in this way, nor do I make light of the advisability to demount external drives before physically disconnecting them - doing it the proper way is always best.

On the other hand, I'll bet more users have lost data because they fell for that goofy Windows "delayed write failure" message that states that all data on the disc has been lost than they have by disconnecting an external without waiting for Windows to agree that the disc drive is, indeed, idle.

I once had a lose power connection to one of my external drives that did cause an interruption during access to that drive. It did damage the drive in such a way that Windows would not recognize or allow subsequent access. Of course, the message from Windows was to reformat the drive - and that would have resulted in loss of all data.

Because the data was important to me, I downloaded a program called "Get Data Back Now" that allowed me to access the disc to retrieve and copy my data to a new drive before reformatting.

I'm sorry to be so lengthy here, but, my bottom line message is that you can't always take Windows error messages as gospel. They always indicate some symptom, but don't always describe the actual problem. The dismount drive function is just plain clunky.

Hope this helps. Please excuse the length.

Caruso

There are several utilities that are around that will show you which files are "open" on your system. It might be illumninating for jhendrix to install a program like this to find out what is going on. If there is no program that he knows of which is accessing the drive - and yet windows is basically telling you that something is... then I would tend to believe windows and want to find out what is going on.

If all else fails.... you should shut-down windows (not simply power off/disconnect the drive). I would not want to risk my work on what I may think windows is up to with open files on a drive. There are enough variables involved without playing what I would consider russian roulette with windows.

The boys in Redmond screwed up again with Service Pack Two. Is anyone really surprised, afterall its Microsoft. Now, Windows can really report stupid things like file such and such is 'in use' and in reality it isn't 'in use' rather more likely last accessed by. So you can have really dumb situations where you may have viewed file X hours ago, and even closing file X in the application you used to view it, if you don't also close down the application used to view it, Windows may under some situations now be dumb enough to think that file 'x' is still 'in use' and won't let you move it, rename it, etc., or in the case of external drives unmount them because it thinks something is open that isn't.

> Is anyone really surprised

My favorite is when my drives have spun down because they’re not beings used and I shut down Windows, so it spins up the drives just to shut them off. Can you say, Department of Redundancy Department? ;-)

~jr

thanks for all the help


I have 2 other issues I hope someone has input on:

1:
a message I am getting on one drive- while trying to open -only one- folder on the drive - is:

X is not accessable. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

Then I try to delate the folder and it says:

Cannot deleate X, the directory is not empty.

Last night it said something like:

The drive is not formatted, would like to format now?

This is all with only one folder, all other folders and files on the drive act normally.



2: When I launch windows it goes to a black screen with a blinking underscore unless I hold down F8 at which time it goes to a start up selection window where I have to choose "hard drive" then it goes to my OS drive 1 or OS drive 2 selection window and starts up normally when I pick one. This just started yesterday and is really annoying considering how many time I have been rebooting latly.