How To Safely Remove Usb Drive From Ps5

1 view

Skip to first unread message

Marie Ota

unread,

Aug 3, 2024, 2:35:38 PM8/3/24

to gentdowspronas

Hi, I seem to have an external hard drive in my dropbox which I don't want there. How do I safely remove it from dropbox without wiping it?! I looked in the desktop app under preferences/backups/manage backups but it's not there. I'm scared to click delete on the web page in case it starts deleting the drive contents. What do I do?

Did this post help you? If so, give it a Like below to let us know.
Need help with something else? Ask me a question!
Find Tips & Tricks Discover more ways to use Dropbox here!
Interested in Community Groups? Click here to join!

Deleting anything can be a scary situation, especially when it's a whole drive's worth of important work stuff! So, I just wanted to check in with you to make sure everything when smoothly when you got around to pressed the button.

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04, and when I rigth click on a my flash drive icon (in the Unity left bar) I get two options that have me confused: eject and safely remove.
The closer I came to an answer was this forum thread, which concludes that (for a flash drive) they are both equal and also equivalent to use the umount command. However, this last assertion seems to be false.
If I use umount from the console to unmount my flash dive, and then I use the command lsblk, I still see my device (with nothing under MOUNTPOINT, of course). On the other hand, if I eject or safely remove my flash drive, lsblk does not list it anymore.

So, my question is, what would be the console command/commands that would really reproduce the behaviour of eject and safely remove?

Arranges for the drive to be safely removed and powered off. On the OS side this includes ensuring that no process is using the drive, then requesting that in-flight buffers and caches are committed to stable storage.

umount is perfectly safe for the disk. Once you've done that you have successfully unmounted the filesystem and you needn't worry along those lines. The primary difference between eject and umount doesn't concern the disk at all - rather it is about the USB port's 5v power output.

After umount you can still see your disk listed in lsblk because it is still powered on and attached. umount an internal hard disk's file-system and you'll see the same behavior for the same reason. But when you eject a USB device you power it down and it ceases to draw the 5v it would typically - I think it trickles down to .5v but that class happened a long time ago.

In the example above: to remove my Hitachi external USB drive I have to unmount all of the partitions on the said drive. To make things easier when formatting my drive I named (labelled) all of its partitions so that the names (labels) begin with 'HIT'.

@hari @isoma No "unmount" and "eject/safely remove" are not the same and even for an external hard drive "eject/safely remove" is not subsumed by "unmount". For instance, consider a drive with two partitions. If the "user" unmounts one of them, the other one will remain mounted, and, as a result, if the user unplugs the drive, they face a data loss on the second partition. On the other hand, if the user "ejects/safely removes" the first partition, both will get unmounted.

I found a way to do this in Nautilus, in Ubuntu 12.04, using Gnome desktop (not Unity). There was no "unmount" in the right-click menu. But, there was an icon to the right of the name of the USB hard drive. I clicked it and it did the unmount, and after that 1) "Mount" was in the menu and 2) "Safely remove" worked fine.

In the resource manager check to see what's using that hard drive. Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Resource Monitor. Or on command line "perfmon.exe /res".perfmon windowGo to the Disk tab and see what Processes have Disk Activity on that drive. This won't solve your problem as windows will probably never put in a nice right click, but it may help figure out what's happening and let you do it without shutting down or sleeping.

At this time, Windows 10 does not treat a memory stick on the USB port the same way it treats a Hard Drive. One option is to turn off the computer. That is, go to the Power > Shut Off. An alternative mentioned by someone else is to go to Sleep mode and then wake up. That does not do any good if I just want to remove the USB connected hard drive and continue my other computer stuff. Microsoft has not fixed this problem. Note, it is an interface problem where the operating system (Windows) should manage this. Sorry, people, Microsoft sees no urgent need to correct their operating system bugs. UNIX and Linux do not make these errors because programmers who care about the user have removed many problems Microsoft programs into their operating systems. In review, Shut Down the computer. Then unplug the USB to your External Hard Drive. There are no other solutions.

Somehow windows always keeps the journal files open:"Always" as in this time I only connected the drive, copied a 10GB VM and wanted to disconnect it afterwards (like 15 minutes after copying, so all copying was done).

As you can see there is no other program keeping a handle on the disk besides System. I tried restarting explorer.exe as well as RemoveDrive.exe from Uwe Sieber. No luck, the locks on the hard drive always remain.

Might it have something to do with me only having a SSD hard drive and the external disk is a regular drive? Might it have something to do with the USB 3.0 drivers (NEC Electronics USB Hub)? I never have this problem when using the regular USB 2.0 ports.

I came by looking for a possible explanation or easier (read: automated/scripted) way to clear this "lock" on the MFT/TxF/NTFS metadata. Thought I'd throw this out there, as I have a solution that has worked for me in countless situations. I have used it to remove all manner of USB and eSATA drives that get stuck like this. The issue does seem to be primarily removable drives that mount as fixed drives, such as those in an eSATA dock or USB enclosure. USB thumb drives generally don't seem to exhibit this issue for me.

An item of note on this last distinction: the Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0, an odd beast comprised of an SSD controller in a USB key's body, also shows up as a fixed drive, though it does seem to have no issue being pulled unceremoniously and without any safe removal being done, so I'm guessing it at least turns off any write caching due to its speed and potentially something else as well, as it never seems to have this issue, always retaining its instant removability. Not necessarily a perfect example, as I haven't been thorough in my testing (this is just anecdotal) but it may shed a little light on this due to its "fixed" nature, yet apparent lack of susceptibility to this issue. Just food for thought.

Anyways, simply put, you need to offline the drive. You can do this in one of two ways. Note: There are slightly shorter ways to do this, but here are the ridiculously thorough steps because I don't know my audience. The GUI method is by far the fastest, owing to the fact that diskpart.exe doesn't take switches or in-line commands/arguments.

I created this batch script to "unlock" any volume. Just run the .bat script as administrator, select the volume, and press ENTER. After it you should be able to use "Safe remove" as usual to detach the unit.

This script is based on @Rook suggestion, so it uses diskpart to make the disk offline. When this is done, all handles are forcibly closed. The difference in this script is that it automatically make the disk back online, so it can be recognized the next time it is connected to the system.

For now you can just attempt to disconnect the external by shutting the computer down and then unplugging it, therefore attempting data loss and then setting it up for easy removal as to prevent data loss when simply unplugging it without unmounting it.

To be honest it sounds sort of like a MBR error where the drive is stuck seeing itself as always plugged in, in which case if you were to unplug the drive while powered on you could damage the MBR and leave you with 2 options, manually repairing the MBR or attempting to use software like MBR repair to be able to access the drive again, or use software like gparted to format the disk again and set a new partition table where the error most likely occurred.

I hear Transactional NTFS is used by autoupdate, but have no clue why the system would want to place this on an external disk and then be unable to stop it upon safe removal request.Fsutil resource info doesn't show any activity.

I had the same thing happening with a flash drive recently. Like you, I kept showing active $Extend handles and assumed they were preventing me from removing the drive safely. I stumbled across this question and tried Sem's fsutil suggestion to no effect. What did work for me was manually unmounting the drive. Since my flash drive was mounted as F:, I ran:

I then unplugged the drive, plugged it back in, remounted it using mountvol f: and used it for a while. When I was finished, I checked the active handles and saw the same $Extend entries I noticed previously. When I tried to do the 'normal' safe removal though, it succeeded despite the active handles.

USB flash drives are an essential tool for any admin but I find the process of safely removing a flash drive under Windows to be inconvenient (click the tray icon, find your drive in the too-much-information USB bus tree, click stop, etc...). I know that most times you can just pull the drive out but I never feel comfortable doing that.