Windows 10: External drive could not be safely removed- it is being used

When I want to safely remove the external drive it shows that is being used. However, it is not. I do not want to remove it by force. or I got to turn off computer.Is there any way to solve this problem.PS. all drivers are updated and Window 10 is also updated.Any help will be appreciated.Thank you

:)

 

Safely Remove Hardware - Windows 10

Hi Grant,

Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Community.

I understand that you have concern about the how to safely removal of external device from Windows 10. I apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.

I suggest you to provide you valuable suggestion in the feedback app.

1. Click on Search bar.

2. Type "Windows Feedback" without the quotes in the search bar and click on it.

3. Then provide your suggestion.

We can also removely safely the external pen drives or external hard drive through below steps.

1. Open File Explorer.

2. It will show the list of Drives available on the computer, then right click on the external drive which you want to remove safely.

3. The click on Eject option from the list.

Let us know if you need any further assistance on Windows related issues and we will be glad to help.

 

Cannot Safely Remove External Drives


Open Device Manager, find "disk drives" and your "external drive" in the list of devices, uninstall the driver for your hard drive and then you can safely remove it. The device driver for your external drive "SHOULD" reinstall automatically next time you want to use the drive.

 

How to safely remove an external drive?

@Enter and @TV2: Sorry, I'm also not set up for email notification. Very interesting discussion since my last post.

A few additional thoughts/questions ...

Hmmm... I don't know and I can't figure out how to replicate or create something similar on my system, I suspect because I don't have the 'Operation' column in Process Explorer. I've never seen that column before, and I can't figure out how to activate it on my Win7 system. How did you get it to display? (Is it perhaps only available in Win10?)

Do those FreeCommander P:\ line entries have any associated handles if you open handles in the lower pane (Ctrl+H)? When you see this kind of entry after FreeCommander is closed, does a Process Explorer search (Ctrl+F) for 'P:\' find any open handles associated with FreeCommander? If not, then it doesn't seem like deleting/closing the P:\ line entries would be necessary before removing the external USB drive.

I haven't previously noticed handles like the AIMP.exe handles shown here (without the drive P\: in the handle Name, and with 'Section' as the handle Type). Do those handles close if you close AIMP?

At any rate, I'm guessing they are not relevant to the inability to safely remove the external USB drive, as it appears you searched for "P:" rather than "P:\", and those handles were found because they include "P:" in the handle Name (AIMP:MouseHookShare and AIMP:KeyboardHookShare).

Without researching it further (which I don't have time or energy to do right now), I'm still not 100% certain what produces the ...$Extend\$RmMetadata\$Txf handles. I previously mentioned from recollection of my research a few years ago that these handles are associated with NTFS journaling, but if I remember correctly, commenters in some forums/blogs thought they might be associated with Windows Indexing or Recycle Bin. My best recollection is that after sifting through everything I could find, I was about 90-95% certain the culprit was/is NTFS journaling.

I've since forgotten much of what I learned at that time, but this MSDN blog post by Raymond Chen (Jan 1, 2013) seems to explain the relevant basics of NTFS journaling in regard to removing an external USB drive. If I understand it correctly, the journaling is the first of several steps whenever changes are made to a file on an NTFS drive, and "provides file system recoverability by logging ... operations required for any transaction that alters important file system data structures ... before these operations are carried through on the disk" (e.g., before all other steps necessary to complete copying/altering/deleting a file). File data loss/corruption problems can occur if an external USB drive is removed before all the other steps are completed. As you obviously already understand, with write caching enabled, it is possible that the remaining steps may not actually be completed when the OS informs the user that the copying is complete, as the file changes cached in RAM may not yet written to the removable drive (presumably depending on how busy the OS is, data transfer speed, etc.). So their could be data corruption if the drive is unplugged before those steps are completed.

But disabling write caching is supposed to avoid such problems, so file operations are supposed to be complete when the OS tells you they are complete:
"Write-behind caching is disabled by default on removable drives. You get into this mess only if you override the default. And on the dialog box that lets you override the default, there is a warning message that says that when you enable write-behind caching, you must use the Safely Remove Hardware icon instead of just yanking the drive."
It seems to me that if journaling is the first step in any file-system change, then once you can be confident the other steps involved in file changes are completed, obviously no further journaling is necessary and the drive can be removed. Basically, as I understand it, journaling protects the file system structures (preventing file system corruption), while disabling write-caching protects the data contents inside those already protected file system structures (preventing file data corruption due to premature unplugging).

So my reasoning is that *IF*, in fact, the ...$Extend\$RmMetadata\$Txf handles are created/used by NTFS journaling as I have surmised, then "yanking the drive" with those journaling handles still open shouldn't cause any problems, as long as you verify other handles are closed and you have allowed enough time for all other file operations to complete. (Usually should be a few seconds at most, but pretty cautious and I figure I'm safe if I've waited 10-15 minutes.)

...But this reasoning hinges on whether I'm correct about the source of the ...$Extend\$RmMetadata\$Txf handles.

Given the ubiquity of external USB drives and the frequency of the ...$Extend\$RmMetadata\$Txf handles problem, it has always seemed strange to me that Microsoft has not (AFAIK) at a minimum:

• authoritatively clarified the issue, so users can be confident about what is going on (Is it NTFS journaling?)
• provided some guidance on 'safe' practices or workarounds (Is it 'safe' to unplug if those are the only open handles?)

...But I don't think those minimums are actually sufficient (especially since most average users would never see them or probably understand them. Instead, if these ...$Extend\$RmMetadata\$Txf handles are, in fact, associated with journaling, it seems to me Microsoft should build into Windows some way of automatically closing the handles when the user attempts to "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media", or provide a GUI option to do so, if/when that is the only issue preventing safe removal.

This reminds me that when I previously researched this, there was also some discussion in the Everything Search forum about whether NTFS indexing by Everything Search might be preventing external USB drive removal (and maybe something about whether Everything made use of the ...$Extend\$RmMetadata\$Txf handles ???). I don't recall the issues clearly right now, but I think there were some suggestions about how to tweak the Everything NTFS Index settings that seemed to make sense. ...But IIRC correctly I tried the suggested remedies without success.

I can see that this refers to what appears to be a Recycle Bin (S-1-5-21-263......), but any chance you could post an English translation of the first 5 lines?

Ohhh, very interesting!!!

Did you check what happened to the ...$Extend\$RmMetadata\$Txf handles in Process Explorer after you deleted the $Recycle.bin? ...I'm assuming they must have been closed/gone, but I'm trying to understand if deleting the $Recycle.bin closed the handles. If so, maybe they don't have to do with NTFS journaling, or perhaps NTFS journaling and Recycle Bin interact somehow (???)

I'm glad you've been looking at this so closely and willing to put so much time into researching it and posting your results, as it's a very frequent and vexing problem, and it would be nice to get a clearer understanding. I put a couple questions in boldface and blue above to make them easier to pick out. Like I said earlier, I'm not set up for email notification, but I'll try to check back regularly for the next few days to continue our discussion if you have anything further to post.