Resolved Safely eject device issue

Why is it that I can use, and then "Safely Eject" a typical USB flash drive but when I use a USB external disk I can't do that, always getting a message that the drive is in use by another, unknown and undefinable, other program.

The only way to safely eject the drive is either by restarting, (which appears to kill any background processes), and then ejecting with no issues, or wait until a power down when, of course, it is perfectly safe to remove the drive.


Are external drives protected in some way? I have checked that no background indexing is in progress.

I am sure, it was possible to eject normally until some recent update or upgrade.

Is it me or the computer?

 

You actually pretty much answered your own question. Your external disk is being used by another process. That could be any running program, or even a Windows process. For example, is that external drive designed as Windows backup drive?

From Device Manager > Disk Drives, if you right click this external drive and select Properties > Policies, do you have "Quick removal" ticked or Better performance? If Better performance, you might try Quick Removal.

 

Thanks. Just checked and the "Quick removal" option was checked. I now find, from that page, that if that is checked you can safely remove the drive without using the "official" method.


Wonder what those processes were, as a matter of interest.

Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction!