Safely Remove USB Thumb Drive :: Light Stays On Drive
Sep 28, 2009
Before I remove a USB thumb drive, I click the green check from notification area; I click the message that appears next to the green check, Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device - drives (F:, G; then a dialog box appears that states, This device can now be safely removed from computer.
The light on the thumb drive, however, stays lighted. I previously followed a procedure where the light would go off on the thumb drive when I did a Safely Remove.
Should the light on the thumb drive go off before it can be safely removed? If so, how do I get the thumdrive light to go off?
When I try to disconnect my external usb drive I get the following message. " Windows can't stop your Generic volume device because it is in use. Close any programs or windows that might be using the device, and then try again later." I have no programs running that would be accessing the USB external drive that I know of. Is there some way to find out what program is accessing it? I have things in the back ground like Windows Onecare who uses that drive to back up my files, but happens in the middle of the night.
The Hard Drive LED light on my Sony Vaio keeps blinking EVERY SECOND. When it's really quiet I can hear it too, it's constantly writing. Constantly. I did my research - read all the threads on the net and so far I have disabled:
Windows index Windows defender Windows search Superfetch System Restore Readyboost Defragmenter I have uninstalled google desktop.
The system is totally virus and spyware free, and the anti-virus is not scanning (schedule scan disabled). All Vista updates are installed. Nothing has helped. I've run out of things to disable. I'm running Vista Business SP1, Dual Core 2.2 Ghz, 3 Gb RAM.
Can you use a thumb drive as a bootable floppy? For such things as updating the BIOS? I don't have a physical floppy drive and it appears that without it you can't update the bios. Never had a thumb drive before and their really cheap now. Just wanted to know how do you go about making it bootable and such if this is doable!
I have a San Disk 4GB Cruzer Micro thumb drive with U3 on it. I had orginally gotten the drive when I had a HP that was running Windows XP. It worked fine on that computer. Well the XP machine took a crap and was replaced with a Compaq that is running Vista Home. The drive was NOT inserted with the HP crashed. Now when I insert the Thumb drive into a usb port it lights up and shows in "my computer" as an Audio CD with a drive letter of "H". The Launchpad does not start and the password screen does not come up either. The directory of the drive only shows 1 file (which does not open) and there was aprox 1000 files on it before. San Disk has been no help and I have not been able to find anything on the internet that has helped. Oh did I mention that I have very little computer knowledge, .
I normally would not be to ticked about this but all the files on the drive are family photos, photo's of hunting trips etc. I know my fault for not saving them to a CD and relying on a thumb drive but I thought they were more reliable than this. Here is a little twist, I have another Sandisk thumb drive that was used with the XP machine but this one works on the vista machine! I havent been able to try the drive that I am having trouble with on another XP machine as I dont have access to one (work switched all computers to vista). I dont know if it is a formatting issue or what but I can not figure it out.
I have noticed that even after being told it is "safe to remove hardware" the light on the thumb drive doesn't go off and the next time I put it into the USB drive of my Vista machine, it always says that the drive needs to be scanned and fixed. If it was just one thumb drive, I would think it was the drive, but I get this with all of them, I have three Dane Elec drives, two Sony, a Memorex and a SanDisk Cruzer. Is this a bug that hasn't been worked out yet, or is there something I am missing?
I have a PNY 16g thumb drive with both my msoffice and vista cd's copied to it and a few other things. When I boot, the drive isn't recognizedand doesn't turn on. If I pull it out and put it back in while vista is running it lights up and everything is fine.
My cousin is having an issue with her computer at the moment, when she goes to shut down the computer (start, turn off, turn off) and the computer then does what it needs to do to shut down safely, thens shuts down, a light comes back on. (I cant seem to be able to draw it so hopefully my explaination of it is ok.) It has a square ontop of a line in between two other squares. Her computer is an acer - aspire, intel, OS is windows xp.
my husband's computer won't boot at all. The green light comes on but the hard drive just beeps. It looks at the cd drive but that is it. Is there anything I can do to fix this. I don't have any recovery disks.
I plugged in my Toshiba USB hard drive when I first got my computer about a week ago, to transfer programs and files to the new computer.
Now, for the past several days I have tried to remove it and I keep getting the message, "cannot safely remove it because it is in use"!
It is NOT in use as far as I know. In fact today I started my computer and did not even access the drive at all yet I get the same error from "Safely Remove Hardware".
I have turned indexing off on the drive, on both partitions.
MS sent me a "Hotfix" via email but when I went to install it there were all kinds of warnings with it, basically telling me "use this at your own risk, we are not vouching for this being reliable!" So I was rather afraid to do it.
When trying to safely remove a SanDisk Cruzer 2GB flash drive on my new laptop, it does not stop the device. Actually, nothing happens. The icon does appear in the taskbar, but it just doesn't do anything.
When trying to remove it via windows explorer, explorer freezes and has to be restarted.
When shutting down or restarting Vista with the USB device still attached it freezes. In safe mode, the device does stop after using "safely remove hardware" and I get this message that it has been stopped. Is this a problem of Vista or is it my new laptop?
When I connect any usb device, Safely Remove Hardware icon doesn't appear. It is not hidden in notification arae.What is the problem? I can't remove my hardwares safely.
I've been lurking on these forums for a while, and decided to finally register and add a few of my thoughts on software here. There are some excellent threads on good software around this part of the forum, but as always I have some favorites of my own. Here's my list of useful (free) things; It's not a COMPLETE list, see the stickies for that.. Some of the things I'll list here are alternatives to suggested software in other threads, I'll try to give a brief comment on why I prefer one over another.
NKProds nCleaner - While ccleaner does a good job, it has messed things up for me a number of times. nCleaner hasn't caused any problems at all for me (yet). It does a wonderful job of cleaning up (both disk and registry), and also includes some basic tweaking. The UI is a huge improvement over the really unintuitive ccleaner, and is definetely a better choice for inexperienced users (I recommend it for everyone though, regardless of level of expertise). PeaZip - It looks better than 7-zip, unpacks TONS of formats and has a native x64 binary... Nothing else to say. HotSwap! - Safely remove eSATA drives (and other stuff if you choose).... Yes, it needs to be done. Serious Samurize - Widgets on steroids, there's nothing more customizable. It's not made to be simple though, so expect to fiddle about ALOT if you want something unique. There goes... Just my few cents.
I am Using Vista Ultimate 64. I would like to tranfer my entire drive incuding all files and the Operating system From my current IDE HDD to a new SATA Drive of the sames size (500 Gig) I need the IDE Drive for an older computer ( The 40 Gig IBM Deathstar still functions great, but all programs seem more bloated these Days)
Anyway I went to Administrative Tools and Formated the New Drive NFTS with no Drive Letter. But I cannot get it recognized as a transfer device when I go to system backup. Can I use 'C' on the second and soon to be only drive? If I have to use E or F for now can I change it back later. would that affect the file system? I intend to Low level Format the IDE and try cloning the old machine's XP Drive (32 bit) to it in the second place.
I have a built in sd card reader in my Rizeon laptop which appears in device manager as working ok and most upto date driver installed. It also appears in the safely remove device icon. However nothing appears in my computer and I cannot find any way to access the drive. I have windows vista home premium installed fully updated. I suspect the problem could be something to do with windows vista. Any one else come across the same problem?
I have a Sony Vaio laptop with Vista Home + SP1. It came with just a C drive. I decided to create a second D drive so that the operational side would be on C drive and data would be on D drive. The intention was to create a situation where, if I had to use the recovery disk, it could just replace C drive with the factory settings, while leaving data in place on D. But now I want to remove the separate drive D and restore the space to drive C. I have backed up everything in drive D to external media. However, whatever I do, I cannot find a way to simply dump drive D and have the space reallocated to drive C. THe system will let me create additonal drives, and shrink drives, but not just reallocate them to C drive. Of course, if all else fails, I can restore all my data to drive D, but for reasons associated with the use of an iPod I want the maximum space available in C drive to cope with this. But I can find no way to do this.
I have two hard drives ,each hard drive is partitioned into 2.
Drive 1 Partition C: Partition D:
Drive 2 Partition E: Partition F:
I have Vista Home Premium on C: Drive. Have Windows 7 on E: Drive. My Boot File is on the C : Drive for both Operating Systems. If I want to remove Vista on Drive 1 , Partition C: First of all what would be the easiest way of removing Vista? Reformat the drive or can you uninstall it with the programs?? If I do Format the C: Drive,I would loose the Boot Manager File. I would probably not be able to even boot into Win 7. If I can not boot into 7 Can I insert the DVD do a repair to bring back the Boot file to C:? Or can I just use a second party Boot Manager like Easy BCD to configure Boot manager??
I am using Windows Vista 32 Bit, laptop, it came with a with a Crive & a Drive, is there anyway to remove or delete the Drive, as I do not use ut at all. I do not want it.
I'm running Vista on a PC that has a hd that has been formated into 3 discrete drives.Vista is loaded onto the C drive, programmes are loaded onto the d drive while i have my data stored on my E drive. By default any documents I save are directed towards My Documents on the C drive - how I go about changing that so the default is my Documents on the E drive?
The problem I have is a file on my hard drive which i cannot remove. If i try to delete it then explorer restarts and i recieve the error message Error 0x80070057:The parameter is incorrect. The file was 3.4TB...yes TB which cannot be as my...........
I recently acquired a new Sony Vaio laptop computer with Vista pre-installed. how to remove all of Vista from my machine without using a fairly large hammer on the hard drive? I would like to get back to some pleasant computing with XP.
I tried to do some work with a usb drive that was on a XP Pro system. both system have the same user and password. This user is an administrator on both systems. When I try to remove a directory on the usb drive I get access denied. If i try to look at the level of security for this directory it say that I can't view the security. If I try to run the cmd as administrator and view the security it says access denied. How the heck are you supposed to correct this type of error. The book says to run cmd as administrator. But that does not seem to work. If I knew that XP PRO would work on this laptop I would remove Vista I've never had so much trouble with a new OS.
I have an external hard drive that's divided into 2 partitions. I want to reformat the drive and eliminate the partitions. (Or do I say I want to have only 1 partition?) How do I get rid of the two partitions?
I have a computer from HP, Hp Pavilion 3200n slimline, running vista 32, 4 gb Ram, Athlon 64X2, I have my C: drive partitioned to accomidate for the making of the recovery disks. Can I remove the D: to make my C: drive bigger?
I just purchased a USB hard drive to use for backup purposes. Ran complete image backups on the internal hard drive, no problems. Now when I try to use the "safely remove hardware" icon in the system tray, it keeps telling me that the device is in use. I checked Device Manager and the option "optimize for quick removal" is checked. Indexing is turned off. I can't figure out what's using it.
I have four (4) hard disks C: D: E: F: all are connected with sata cable and power cable.(of course) The F: is outside from the pc and connected via external SATA and power cable (like usb NOT usb) I know,with USB external hard disk i can use the safely remove option.
Is there any option to safely remove SATA hard disk without Shut Down the pc?
1) Start-Control Panel-Device Manager-Disk Drives-Right Click on hard disk-Properties-Policies-UntikDisable the Enable write cashing on the disk??
2) Start-Control Panel-Device Manager-Disk Drives-Right Click on hard disk-Disable??
Have you had any problems with USB flash drives with Vista? I saw articles saying that Vista doesn't have "Safely Remove Hardware" like in XP, and some people aren't sure when to remove the flash drive from the computer. Is one USB flash drive different from another, except in size?
when booting up from a vista cd I accidentally had my usb external hard drive plugged in and the drive has been emptied and replaced by windows there are sintimental photos etc on the drive can anyone help me to restore them
