You’re using a flash drive. You close your file. You click the little green icon to “Safely Remove Hardware”.
You get an error message: “TRY STOPPING THE DEVICE AGAIN LATER”.
Oh, sure. I’ll just step outside, have a smoke, maybe grab a bite to eat, read the newspaper…
WHAT THE F&%# DO YOU MEAN, "**LATER**"? What "later"? There is no "later"! Either tell me what you don't like NOW, or shut the f%%# up.
(YANK!)
I suspect that some file had not completely finished closing. “Later” might mean in just a few seconds.
Was it a Word file by any chance? Or Access?
Like tdn said: it’s probably being accessed by some process (sometimes an Explorer Window, showing its contents will suffice).
On the MSDN site you can find an utility (Process Explorer) which can substitute your Task Administrator utility and which may help you to trace any links that are still accessing your device. It’s quite a bit better than the default utility.
I get that every single time I try to stop my USB hard drive - even if nothing has been written to it or read form it; first time it ‘cannot be stopped now’; two seconds later, it can be stopped and is safe to remove. At the very least, that message box needs a ‘retry’ button.
I get that with my iPod sometimes. If I close iTunes, sometimes that helps. Sometimes I just have to shut down the computer, and it “sheds” the iPod along the way. I unplug it before I start back up.
What “little green icon”? I just close whatever file I’m using and pull the flash drive out. Am I doing something that might cause me to lose my files? :eek:
For my computer, it looks like a little grey disk with a green arrow above it. It’s in the bottom right corner of my screen, by the icons for stuff like AIM and the computer volume.
I don’t know how likely it is or not, but I know it is possible for you to lose your data on your flashdrive if you don’t eject the flashdrive safely before pulling it out.
This discussion came up here once before and I think the consensus is that once it stops writing to your USB drive, it is safe to pull it out. If your drive has a LED on it, you will know for sure when it is done writing. Also, I think this only applies to the later versions of Windows (including XP).
As to the OP, right on! You’re the freaking computer, do what I say or tell me why you can’t. There is no ‘later’ in good computing. It reminds me of bad programmers that stick delays in their code until the problem goes “away”. But as someone said above, I have noticed Explorer (not IE) tends to release directories after a short delay. I guess this is the source of the ‘later’.
OS tells external drive to flush its write cache to disk and inform it when it is ready to be disconnected. External drive begins this process but is more sluggish about it than the OS anticipates, so it complains to you about it.
On the MacOS platform, a drive (local or network) is “mounted” (hey, knock it off with the Beavis & Butthead) and appears as an icon on the Desktop, and the process of “unmounting”, which should precede physical disconnection (or shutdown of the network connection if it’s a network drive), ends up with the icon disappearing. We have the same problem of sluggish drives taking their own sweet time on occasion. It manifests by the icon simply staying there on the Desktop for a longer period before finally going away. Windows doesn’t do the “drive icon on the Desktop” thing, so it wisely warns you “Umm, don’t unplug that sucker just yet, it hasn’t given me the ‘ok’ sign”. Why it doesn’t say “It’s not safe yet, please wait” rather than “Try again later”, … maybe it’s because if the device is taking that long there might be a problem, and you can choose to not “try again later” and do some troubleshooting, rather than the OS going into never-ending “yo drive, leggo already” mode - ??
Thanks for the tips. The OS I’m using is Windows XP. I don’t have the icon that’s mentioned above. A light comes on the jump drive when it’s plugged in and stays on until it’s unplugged.
So far, I can’t see where anything has been damaged or lost. I do wait a few minutes after closing the files before unplugging the jump drive.
I once ruined a floppy disc by taking it out too fast, so I’ve been cautious with the USB thingys.
Yeah, I know.
I said:
It does? Where and when, pray tell, does it say that?
That would be a paraphrase of “TRY STOPPING THE DEVICE AGAIN LATER”.
As I said, I’m not sure why the message doesn’t say something closer to “The device is not responding with the alacrity one would expect…don’t unplug it yet”, but then I surmised that maybe the OS is giving you the opportunity to NOT try stopping it later, in the event that there’s a problem that needs to be troubleshot first?
That would be a paraphrase of “TRY STOPPING THE DEVICE AGAIN LATER”.
Therein lies my question: I have never seen the phrase “Try stopping the device again later”.
All I do is plug the jump drive into a USB port, open files in it, use them, close the files and pull the thing out of the port.
Do I need to be “installing hardware” and later “removing hardware” through some sequence of keyboard operations? As far as I can tell it’s been working just fine so far, but I don’t want to lose a bunch of work one day through simple ignorance.
When you plug the jump drive into the USB port, watch carefully in your system tray (in the lower right corner of the screen where your clock is). You will see a new icon appear. It looks like a small USB device with a green arrow above it. This is the icon you can click on to “stop” your device before you unplug it.
As others have stated, this is not usually necessary with XP, as long as you are sure that all files have been read/written to the device, but it gives a little extra safety measure.
I’m sure that 90% of the time that I see this message, it’s because I have Explorer (not IE) open with the flash drive selected or current.
At last!!! Instructions I can understand. It worked, even as you prophesied. I owe ya’ a beer/drink/day’s fishin’ on my pond.
Thanks!
Y’all wanna know somethin’? My late mother (rest in peace) used to say all this computer shit was magic. Nothing else made any sense. The more I fuck around with these damn things, the more I think she was right.
It (almost) makes sense if you study it…
… and then again, even then, it occasionally seems as if the computer just kind of leans back, yawns, and says “I don’t feel like it.”