| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 |
| Months | ||
|---|---|---|
| Jan | Feb | Mar |
| Apr | May | Jun |
| Jul | Aug | Sep |
| Oct | Nov | Dec |
Thu, 28 Jul 2005
[16:49] Stopping USB Devices in Windows
Date: 7/29/05 at 12:49PM
I store my To Do list and various other sundries on my USB key and invariably when I try to remove it in the evenings I get the annoying "The device 'Generic Volume' cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later." message. Why they don't include a list of PIDs or process names or SOMETHING in that message to indicate what you could do to expedite the arrival of 'later' is beyond me.
The best way to find the locking processes that I've worked out so far is to grab Process Explorer from the Sysinternals Freeware site and, using the Find Handle (Ctrl+F) functionality search for Harddisk. Windows mounts USB drives as \Device\Harddiskx where x is a number between 0 and however many drives you've got in your machine (minus 1 if you want to be pedantic :). I currently have two drives in my machine, \Disk\Hardisk0 which is the internal drive and \Device\Hardisk1 which is the USB drive. You can determine your drive numbers by opening the Computer Management management console - located under Control Panel > Administrative tools - and clicking on the Storage\Disk Management option.
After doing the search you will be given a table of process names, pids and handles that should lead you to the locking process pretty quickly. The one I just did returned this:
As you can see explorer.exe and pdksh.exe are using Hardisk1 at the moment.
category: /modblog | permalink | Comments suspended due to spamwhores