USB HDD cannot be ejected safely. W7

Archive
1

Not 100% sure of my facts here.

When I try to safely disconnect my USB HDD ( used as the Ghost backup destination) Windows 7 tells me I can't remove it since its in use.

I use the safely eject media Icon for this. And I suspect that its Ghost services that are not stopped when I ask to eject.

Not sure if this is a fault or a request for a product improvement.

Is there a way to force Ghost to let go of the drive whenever I try to eject the HDD??  Other than a complete system shut down?

Thanks

 

2

Try shutting the pc down in the normal way and Windows should shut the external drive down before it actually shuts the system down,

normally when you get that message the device is usually open but not being written to.

Try another USB device to see if that will disconnect.

 

Deric

3

Perhaps I missed the point---I was trying to avoid having to "shut the machine down normally"?  That part's no hassle.  I use my external HDD for other purposes as well as Ghost backups and now and again I want/need to disconnect it from one machine and use it elsewhere.  Can't do that using the windows facilities to EJECT a USB drive since GHOST doesn't react to this request.

4

You can stop the Ghost service, run the "safely remove hardware" and then restart the Ghost service.

It might be a pain if you find the need to do this often.  I'm not sure what causes the external drive to be in use, I believe it only happens with some external drives.

If you need to do this a lot, a better solution may be to schedule the image to be made onto an internal drive and then use the "offsite copy" feature to copy the images onto the USB drive.

 

Dave

5

Thanks Kudos--might be a good idea.

Then again it might be something other than Ghost( not sure) windows 7 indexing perhaps?

6

I think you will find it is Ghost hanging it up, but you'll be able to verify that next time it happened.

There has been a few topics about that here and I can't find the one I'm looking for right now but if I do I will post the link.

At first I thought it only happened when the external drive was used as a source, as in when someone scheduled a backup or image of the external drive.

But then I recall it happening to some people who only used the external drive as a destination, I'll look for that topic and see if it was ever resolved.  At one point I was trying to write a batch file to do it but I couldn't figure out a way to disconnect a USB drive though a command.

 

Dave

7

Thanks Dave H.  The external drive is just the destination for the ghost backup.  I'll try killing the Ghsot service next time the probem happens.  Mind you it could still be indexing since its a 1TB drive so indexing might take a while----time will tell.

 

8

I never have this problem because I don't have a regular backup scheduled.  I run mine manually whenever I am going to make a big change, of every two months or so.

-Mike