Terry's Computer Tips - Newsletter
December 3, 2006

Volume 2, Number 25 — Sunday, December 3, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Protect Your Computer — Block Spyware and Adware
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7.  Flash Drive Won't Disconnect from Windows

Subscriber Andre Cantin wrote this week about a problem he was having with his flash drive and Windows XP. Most of the time, we can use the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the Windows XP Status Bar to tell Windows that we want to remove it. But, sometimes that doesn't solve the problem...

Hi Terry,

I appreciate a lot your weakly newsletters which provide very interesting and practical information. I want to have your help on this problem. I got a message error (The device "Kingston DT Elite HS 2.0 USB Device" cannot be stopped because a program is still accessing it) when I click the "Safely remove hardware" button to remove securely my flash drive connected through a USB 2 connector of my Dell Dimension 9200. What I can do to prevent this message to appear? For the moment, I am just removing the device without any apparent detrimental effect on the data of my flash drive device. Thank you for your help.

Andre Cantin Ph D Ing/Eng

The most common reason for this error is that you have a program open that is accessing a directory on the device.

For example, you might have Windows Explorer open, with a directory selected on that device. Or, you might have Microsoft Word open, with a file from the device opened in Word.

However, sometimes Windows XP just gets confused, even if the Windows Explorer and other programs have been closed. Windows, then, never fully relinquishes the device.

This happens because Windows Desktop, Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer are all actually the same program -- just showing different displays. In other words, the program explorer.exe is still running, and sometimes it forgets to release a device.

The only safe way to remove your USB device, when that happens, is to reboot. Since Windows XP automatically caches disk writes, you really don't know when it actually writes to the USB device.

But, when you do a shutdown or restart, Windows XP will flush the cache to the drive -- that is, it will write the data to the drive. Once Windows has shut down or as it starts the new boot process, you can remove the drive. If you leave it in the USB port until Windows has rebooted, be sure to do the "Safely Remove Hardware."

Andre noted "without any apparent detrimental effect..."

He's been lucky. If you pulled the drive as Windows was writing to it, you could lose not only the info you were attempting to write, but also all pre-existing files on the device.

I can say: "Been there, done that." Not only did I lose the files that I was writing to the flash drive, I lost everything that was already on that flash drive.

Since I know some people use flash drives for backup or even for their only copy of certain files (a practice that I strongly discourage!), I hope this article will help you from falling into that trap.

Here's another of my articles on flash drives, which which you should read:
Flash Drive Not Recognized

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Volume 2, Number 25 — Sunday, December 3, 2006

Copyright © 2006 Terry A. Stockdale.  All rights reserved.