How to force stop an external hard drive for easily safe ejection/removal?

archz2 said:

Not a good idea. Arranging another hard drive, and then spending hours to emptying my entire 90 percent filled 5TB exernal hard drive to reformat it as exfat, then copying everything back just to solve a 2 minute irritation isn't a good solution.

btw, your signature is so hilarious!! "so I'm total neutral and impartial in my haterage"

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I know.. moving TB of data is not fun.. even less fun on USB2... USB1 and you probibly end up finishing the copy year 3026.

Yeah.. its true.. i do hate all OS's after all this years now.. The breaking point was in 2022 i think.. then i really started to hating installing/tweaking and set up systems.. and not a single OS is good.. they all have its pros and cons.. but no one and i mean no one is a good OS.

tpriest said:

Had a look in Services to look for Volume Shadow Copy - Status is blank (not running) and Startup Type is Manual.

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I dont remember exactly what it was.. i looked in to this back in 2018/2019ish.. But i have a vague memory of shadow copying being involved as it maps the filesystem of free/used space.
Next time you get the disk is busy on eject.. open windows system monitor and look at disk activity.

tpriest said:

After 10+ attempts it's still being used

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This method is unreliable................!

Just pull the plug!!!
If it's not write caching and, you're not actually transferring data, the most it could be doing is being scanned or generating thumbnails, etc.

Could right-click start button and select disk management.

Right-click on the drive and select offline then you can just disconnect power from it.

Might need to go back into disk management and set it back to online the next time you power the drive back on or plug it in again.

For this particular problem I have placed a simple batch file on my desktop to refresh Windows Explorer, attached here (just change the *.txt extension to *.bat). Make sure all your current window work is finished (renaming a sequence of files, etc.) and all work of any kind is saved, then just double-click the batch file. After it runs, use the standard tray button "Safely remove hardware and eject media". It will work unless something else is genuinely using the drive.

To permanently deal with this issue (and many others), next time I build a main desktop machine, it's going to run Linux; I've already put Mint on an old laptop to ease myself into the switch. If I'd known Windows 11 would be such a pain, I'd have done it a year ago when we all had to ditch 10 for 11 (despite the fact that, as pretty much everyone can attest, there was no discernible gain for the end-user).

But unfortunately they suckered me in for one last iteration, and here we are.