Okay. I use my 2GB flash drive to backup my hard drive on a computer that’s, well, let’s just say I don’t have great hopes for its continued good health. Then I attempt to remove the flash drive, the legal way.
I get a message “The device cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device later.”
No dammit, I want to stop it right now. No files are open, everything is copied. I want to remove the USB device and insert another one to download my photos, as they won’t fit on this one.
Are any windows open? Close them. I’ve had a situation where, even though no files were open, explorer still retained some pointer to the drive. I closed the windows and all went well.
I had this happen to me once. I just shut the computer down, then pulled it out when everything was off. My flash drive still works like a champ so it doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects from removing it this way.
I get that message all the time with my bus-powered USB hard drive; even if nothing is running, sometimes it just won’t let you stop the device.
With a flas USB memory device, as long as no writes are in progress, it should be safe to pull it without ‘stopping’ it. Not so my hard drive though, unfortunately, as the disk really ought to be despun before powering down - I have to wait until Windows will let me stop it, or shut down the computer to remove it.
In the system tray, there’s a little icon with a green arrow; click it and a menu pops up listing stoppable devices, click one and it stops it. The idea is that this would provoke Windows to flush any caches/buffers and cleanly stop any indexing that may be in progress. I’ve never heard of anyone having a problem from pulling a flash drive when they had waited until the activity light was out for good, but I have dealt with several cases of disk corruption caused by yanking removable USB-powered hard drives without stopping them, even though no activity was evident.
In Windows XP, the device can be safely removed as long as the system is not actively reading or writing to the device. In older OSes you should use the shutdown icon before removing.
I actually lost a thumb drive with some pretty important stuff on it, simply because I didn’t “stop” it before I removed it.
Yeah, it was the thumbdrive with all my RobEnomics spreadsheets, financial information, personal information, and bill mailing addresses. Let’s just say I learned three things from that little loss (just before last year’s deployment):
BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP!
Always ‘Safely Remove’ a device, rather than rip it right out of the socket.
Don’t put all your informational eggs in one 512KB basket.
Tripler
But RobEnomics still survives to this day
–and that’s just one of it’s beauties.
I have received the message about Windows being unable to stop a USB flashdrive if the PC was booted up while the flashdrive is installed - apparently, the BIOS has taken control of the device, rather than Windows. It’s generally safe to just go ahead and remove it, but for the cautious types, shut down the PC first.
FWIW, the only time I have had any trouble removing a flashdrive without stopping it was after I wrote to the drive. When I removed it, the files I wrote to it weren’t there. This has only happened a few times, but I always stop the drive first now.
I have the opposite problem. If my flash drive is inserted when I boot up, the computer will not recognize it at all. I have to reboot with the drive out. Any explanation for that?
Ditto. Or at least I lost all of the files because the drive directory became unreadable. The data was there–it showed that the drive was more than half full–but even trying it on several different computers, it couldn’t read the directory to tell me what files were there, or let me open files that I knew were there, or even delete anything. I had to download software from the drive’s manufacturer to reset the drive (erasing all the data on it) to make the pen usable again.
Fortunately, they were mostly “transportation copies” of files that I had saved on a hard drive, so I actually lost very little data.
I teach at a university, and I have seen this happen to a couple of students, too. However, given that USB drives are very small, they are also very easy to lose physically. For that reason alone, you should not rely on a USB drive as your only copy of important data.
If it insists the drive is in use despite no explorer windows being open (and nothing obvious like music files playing from the drive etc), then the chances are it’s something to do with a background process - like an anti-virus program - accessing the drive.
If you have an anti-virus program, try disabling it temporarily next time this happens and then try stopping the drive again.
I have also seen certain systems management tools cause this error (for example, Altiris or SMS) when the agent program is trying to scan the drive for inventory reasons.
To be safe, everyone should be stopping their USB flash drives before removal, but as noted above, shutting down the computer is also fine and as long as you have decent backups it’s not much of a worry anyway.