CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Well, my dad got a 2.0 gig portable hard drive to help us transfer a bunch of stuff to a new computer (and just for general purposes). However, I've come against a bit of a road block. See, I hooked it up, got what I wanted onto it, then transferred it onto the second computer. No problemo. And then it happened--

So, I am now ready to remove the portable hard drive from the computer. However, when I click the "safely remove hardware" button and try to close the portable hard drive in order that I can go ahead and remove it-- I get the following warning: "The device 'Generic volume' cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later.' Now, maybe it's just me, but whenever my computer tells me "try again later", I get worried. I tried restarting my computer, but I simply recieved the same message.

Any ideas on what to do? I don't want to just remove the thing without closing it. I figure that would mess it up, but, then again, I don't know that much about portable drives, since I've never used one before. So, has this ever happened to anyone else? Any advice on how I can close it?

Thanks for any help you guys can offer me.

the drive's doing something. Just let your computer sit without doing anything to it for an hour or two and then retry. If it doesn't work then... well... that's gonna be a little harder.

Make sure to close any running programs or windows as having anything access the drive can cause this problem. Also make sure to close everything in the task bar at the bottom of the screen. If that doesn't help, you could take Slater's advice or just save everything and shut down the machine. Unplugging things while the machine is off won't cause any problems.

You can still physically remove the drive, the issue is that your computer sees something on the drive as being in use, most likely. It usually won't hurt anything to just disconnect the drive anyway, it's just not the "clean" way of doing things and you should, of course, do things "properly" whenever possible.

Okay, I let the drive sit over night and this morning it allowed me to remove it. Thanks a million, guys!

That stuff happens all the time, and expect it to happen a lot XD You should simply be able to remove the USB cord out. It's not going to damage your harddrive. (In most cases, I just pull out storage volumes without "safetly" doing so) Only exception being if you're still transfering something back or forth.

While it won't damage the hard drive if nothing is being transfered, I have seen it cause the computer to stop recognizing the device when it is plugged in, so I wouldn't suggest removing the device without stopping it first except as a last resort. Simply shut down the machine or wait instead.

Yeah...

* If you can shut the machine off, then unplug it, the turn the machine back on it should be fine.

* If you are not activly transfering data to it, just unplug it.

I just unplugged it once.... It crashed the computer.

I'd say if you're going to unplug it without safely dismounting it, it's good practice to wait a minute or three in case Windows has a cached operation it's waiting to do.

But then, I don't particularly trust Windows.

Icarus wrote:I just unplugged it once.... It crashed the computer.

I'm sorry, but:



I wouldn't trust a computer that I couldn't pull an external drive off of without crashing it.

I don't think I've ever crashed a computer by unplugging a removable drive.

I have seen one crash from plugging in a mouse, but that was a rather messed-up installation. (no, it wasn't my fault)

Mithrandir wrote:I wouldn't trust a computer that I couldn't pull an external drive off of without crashing it.

I don't really trust it either (WinXP, proccessor < 1GHz, 256MB mem). Yeah, not a good machine.

Icarus wrote:I don't really trust it either (WinXP, proccessor < 1GHz, 256MB mem). Yeah, not a good machine.

Can XP even operate less than a Ghz?

AnimeHeretic wrote:Can XP even operate less than a Ghz?

Is Icarus' computer even "operating" or is it "sort-of-operating".