Solved Hot Swap drive won't eject.

I just shucked a WD Elements drive I want to use in IcyDock MB830SPs I have installed in various Windows desktops. The drive has worked fine in the Elements for years BUT USB 3 is slower than SATA and more significantly, the WD Elements would put itself to sleep which then added 5 or more seconds to common activities such as opening Windows Explorer while they waited for it to wake up.

I'm trying to figure out why I can't eject it. All my other drives can be ejected from any of the 3 IcyDock bays so it's not a BIOS issue.

Typically, I use the Process Explorer (admin mode) Find option searching drive letter to find what is using a drive and preventing it from ejecting. But drive letter isn't finding any hits other than the System which always appears in all drive letter finds.

So.... that suggests to me that whatever is preventing the drive from being ejected is NOT based on a drive letter but rather something like a device ID.

Any ideas what process could be preventing it being ejected OR what other value other than drive letter I could search in Process Explorer with to find the process? I realize that is unlikely to solve the problem but is a necessary step in that direction.

The drive is a WD100EMAZ-00WJTA0. I am hesitant to throw red herrings into this but... FYI these drives will not power up on some power supplies based on what's on the 3.3v pin of the drive. The work-around is to put non-conducting tape on the pin OR power it with a Molex to SATA adapter bypassing the power supply reacting to the 3.3v (and some other pins) on a SATA connector. Since the drive will be regularly mounted and dismounted, I chose to change the power to the IcyDock to a Molex to SATA adapter rather than dealing with tape issues from constantly plugging and unpluging the drive.

I cannot see how Molex to SATA adapter is a factor since all over drives continue to register and eject in all bays of the IcyDock.

Additional info:

Inability to eject occurs whether the drive is in the bay at boot time or mounted after boot. It also doesn't matter if logged on as a Microsoft or local account. Fails to eject even if the first thing attempted after booting or mounting the drive is to attempt to eject it.

The drive letter is configured to allow caching (just like all the drives that eject just fine) and I suspect turning that off MAY solve the eject problem by making it pretty safe to just remove it even if the eject fails, but I do move large amounts of data on and off this drive and don't want the performance hit.

This won't be much help to you other than information. For what it's worth I have multiple external drives, 2 which are older WD Passports, one which is a WD 2.5' drive I installed in an external enclosure. None of these WD will EVER let me eject them. Windows always locks a handle on these drives, whereas all my other external hard drives (Seagates) will eject just fine.
Whether it has anything to do with it or not, when I went to Windows 11, I was unable to enable core isolation until I removed an old WDCSam driver.

Luckily, I have an older version of an app called USB Safely Remove which was very cheap many years ago. Though very outdated, it still works. The updated version of this app is now paid and isn't cheap. It allows me to force stop any handle Windows retains on these WD drives, or any usb flash drive as well. Once this app releases the handle, I get the message that it's safe to remove the device.

So you aren't alone with these WD devices.

If it is a hot swap drive, it means you can pull it out even without ejecting it.

Can you not just pull the drive out of the bay? As @badrobot says, you can remove it without ejective it because it's a hot swap drive.

To find out what's preventing 'safely remove..' first go to task manager and on the heading right click and tick the box for showing PID. Once showing then left click the heading to show in ascending order.

Open Event viewer, Custom Views, Administrative Events. In the centre pane look for Event ID 225. They should be at or near the top of the list. Open the individual events and check the General tab for info and the Details tab should show the PID.
Go back to task manager and find the PIDs. PID 4 is just the system symptom so check any others showing.

badrobot said:

If it is a hot swap drive, it means you can pull it out even without ejecting it.

Click to expand...

Thanks, But I don't think so. The fact that there is a setting for caching the drive (which is enabled), means some writes may not yet be done to the HD at a particular moment. I may "think" I know what processes could/should be writing to the drive, but the fact that I don't know what is preventing the drive from being ejected, suggests there COULD be something somewhere writing to it.

glasskuter said:

This won't be much help to you other than information. For what it's worth I have multiple external drives, 2 which are older WD Passports, one which is a WD 2.5' drive I installed in an external enclosure. None of these WD will EVER let me eject them. Windows always locks a handle on these drives, whereas all my other external hard drives (Seagates) will eject just fine.
Whether it has anything to do with it or not, when I went to Windows 11, I was unable to enable core isolation until I removed an old WDCSam driver.

Luckily, I have an older version of an app called USB Safely Remove which was very cheap many years ago. Though very outdated, it still works. The updated version of this app is now paid and isn't cheap. It allows me to force stop any handle Windows retains on these WD drives, or any usb flash drive as well. Once this app releases the handle, I get the message that it's safe to remove the device.

So you aren't alone with these WD devices.

Click to expand...

Thanks. This drive is not being accessed via USB. The IcyDoc has a MB SATA cable running to each of the 3 bays and is powered by TWO SATA power sockets, i.e. not one per bay. Was always curious about that since in almost every scenario, both power connectors would be off the same power supply cable.

Fabler2 said:

To find out what's preventing 'safely remove..' first go to task manager and on the heading right click and tick the box for showing PID. Once showing then left click the heading to show in ascending order.

Open Event viewer, Custom Views, Administrative Events. In the centre pane look for Event ID 225. They should be at or near the top of the list. Open the individual events and check the General tab for info and the Details tab should show the PID.
Go back to task manager and find the PIDs. PID 4 is just the system symptom so check any others showing.

Click to expand...

Awesome! Thanks. Just did this and see:

The application \Device\HarddiskVolume7\Windows\System32\SearchIndexer.exe with process id 5000 stopped the removal or ejection for the device SCSI\Disk&Ven_WDC&Prod_WD100EMAZ-00WJTA\4&fe99083&0&040000.
Process command line: C:\WINDOWS\system32\SearchIndexer.exe /Embedding
List of affected devices:

Now to figure out how to prevent this.

jvickers said:

Can you not just pull the drive out of the bay? As @badrobot says, you can remove it without ejective it because it's a hot swap drive.

Click to expand...

You should be able. I've done it plenty of times when I was hot-swapping. This is a non-issue.

Edit:

if you're hot-swapping, you should ensure your BIOS is set to support it so your drives don't get corrupted by just pulling them out.



Mine is disabled as I no longer have a need to hot swap.

Dru2 said:

You should be able. I've done it plenty of times when I was hot-swapping. This is a non-issue.

Edit:

if you're hot-swapping, you should ensure your BIOS is set to support it so your drives don't get corrupted by just pulling them out.

View attachment 62944

Mine is disabled as I no longer have a need to hot swap.

Click to expand...

FWIW Removing drives hundreds or even thousands of times without ejecting them isn't proof you can't lose a write since I doubt you ever intentionally pulled a drive while you thought a write was actually in progress and may even have had cache disabled.

Anyway, @Fabler2 posted how to find the culprit, which turned out to be Search Indexer.

Thanks again @Fabler2. I removed the drive letter from Indexing, rebooted and the drive is ejectable now. I added the drive letter back to indexing and it is still ejectable, pointing to some glitch in Indexing. I'll hope it's not a glitch that repeats but if it does, I can live without Windows Search for that drive.

HoosierDaddy said:

Thanks. This drive is not being accessed via USB. The IcyDoc has a MB SATA cable running to each of the 3 bays and is powered by TWO SATA power sockets, i.e. not one per bay. Was always curious about that since in almost every scenario, both power connectors would be off the same power supply cable.

Click to expand...

Yes I know. You use a dock. That's why I said my experience with the idiosyncrisies I've encountered with WD drives might not help you. I was just pointing out WD drives do not work the same way as my Toshiba and Seagate drives do. I might add that I can connect these same drives to my old Windows 10 PC and they work as expected or I can connect a WD drive to my mobo and things are fine. I can only surmise that it's specific to this machine's hardware or maybe even the age of the drives themselves and the way 11 sees them. I never was able to figure it out.

HoosierDaddy said:

FWIW Removing drives hundreds or even thousands of times without ejecting them isn't proof you can't lose a write since I doubt you ever intentionally pulled a drive while you thought a write was actually in progress and may even have had cache disabled.

Click to expand...

There's also no definite rule that people won't get struck by lightning; or in the PC world, won't have a drive go bad, so...

As the end of the day, it's your PC so do as you will. I'm simply posting the reason to use said settings.

Peace

HoosierDaddy said:

Thanks, But I don't think so. The fact that there is a setting for caching the drive (which is enabled), means some writes may not yet be done to the HD at a particular moment. I may "think" I know what processes could/should be writing to the drive, but the fact that I don't know what is preventing the drive from being ejected, suggests there COULD be something somewhere writing to it.

Click to expand...

Why is it called "hot swappable" then? You can remove a hot swappable drive even without powering off your computer or dock.

Update: As reported it was search that was preventing ejecting in one instance. However, many processes will prevent ejecting for short periods of time and that was the case with Search.

Since removing the drive letter from search, the drive is easily ejected but only if it was not in the bay when Windows booted. Used the same procedure that detected Search preventing an earlier ejection and:

The application \Device\HarddiskVolume7\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Driver and Support Assistant\DSAService.exe with process id 4488 stopped the removal or ejection for the device SCSI\Disk&Ven_WDC&Prod_WD100EMAZ-00WJTA\4&fe99083&0&040000.
Process command line: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Driver and Support Assistant\DSAService.exe"

Tried repairing that app, and no change. Uninstalled the app and now can also eject if the drive was present during boot.

badrobot said:

Why is it called "hot swappable" then? You can remove a hot swappable drive even without powering off your computer or dock.

Click to expand...

You should start another thread to get an answer to that.

HoosierDaddy said:

Update: As reported it was search that was preventing ejecting in one instance. However, many processes will prevent ejecting for short periods of time and that was the case with Search.

Since removing the drive letter from search, the drive is easily ejected but only if it was not in the bay when Windows booted. Used the same procedure that detected Search preventing an earlier ejection and:

The application \Device\HarddiskVolume7\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Driver and Support Assistant\DSAService.exe with process id 4488 stopped the removal or ejection for the device SCSI\Disk&Ven_WDC&Prod_WD100EMAZ-00WJTA\4&fe99083&0&040000.
Process command line: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Driver and Support Assistant\DSAService.exe"

Tried repairing that app, and no change. Uninstalled the app and now can also eject if the drive was present during boot.

Click to expand...

Hi. That Intel Driver & Support Assistant is an old nut in preventing ejecting. When it happens I go to services and stop these two services,



I re-enable them if I want to check for updates.

HoosierDaddy said:

You should start another thread to get an answer to that.

Click to expand...

Just google it up and you'll understand why you don't need to eject a hot swap drive.
You know you have a hot swap drive but you don't understand what it is.