Usb Safely Remove Free License Key
Karriem Drewery
I have a external seagate 1TB USB hard disk. Every time I connect it to my computer it gets automatically mounted. While removing it I select safely remove option rather than unmount because I read somewhere that it is recommended.
Is true that just unmounting can damage my hard disk. Should I always select safely remove option? (I know the difference between unmount and safely remove and I have also noted that unmounting removes it from file table entry but safely removing actually stops using it. The power supply LED goes off after safely removing which doesn't happen with unmount).
Ubuntu comes with Udisks daemon, which allows mounting/unmounting , and doing several other things with block devices (aka drives) without need for sudo as in the case of mount commands. Of particular interest is the options for detaching/powering-off the drive.
Unmounting won't damage your disk or data. Unplugging it while it is still in use can corrupt the data. Unmounting it will generally also sync the filesystem which makes it safe to eject the disk. Check the led for activity. If you want to be totaly sure there is the command sync which, according to the man page, forces changed blocks to disk and updates the super block.
Obviously, System is not a process that I can just kill and be done with it. I've done a bit of research and this seems to be a common problem, but no solution has been found so far (except for rebooting the machine, which I'd like to avoid if possible).
I've always had this problem with one of my Toshiba external drives. I value that drive really high because of its built-in shock detector, what is currently very hard to find. But the cannot-remove-it-safely issue was driving me crazy.
Today, I've hit this question/thread on social-technet MS site. While there's a lot of noise down there, they point out a few common issues. Like the Distributed-Tracking service. It's actually hard to read through it all due to some cohones-size-flame-war that escalated at some point, but reading the topic from its end helps;)
I've got any Distributed-Tracking/Windows-Search/etc services off and was still unable to safely-unplug the drive. Someone somewhere suggested that "quick removal" is the culprit, but almost all my USB drives run on it and I still can remove them safely.
However, I actually tried switching this drive to "high performance mode" and .. it caused the TxfLogContainerXXXX handles to evaporate. So, it's true that this is the quick-removal option. However, this did not released my drive yet. Still couldn't eject it.
I think that the "turn the drive offline" via "computer management -> drive management" might actually be the quickest solution, however I have not tried it since my random attempts helped before I've read about that.
Five years later, I actually fixed this issue by resorting to a commercial tool: USB Safely Remove, which can "force stop" a device suffering from this issue. (Before that, I used the "take offline" workaround mentioned in quetzalcoatl's answer.)
But be careful because the next time you will plug itin, it will still be set as Offline so you will need to set it as Online. The best is probably to do it right away: just after you eject your drive, replug it, set it as Online.
(If there are other handles created by an active scan from Windows Defender - exclude the root of the drive by adding it the Windows Defender exclusion list:
Virus & threat protection settings > Exclusions
Setting Removal policy to better performance from devmgmt.msc did not help for my 1TB Seagate Expansion Portable Drive. Only when i used services.msc to turn off "Crypkey License" it worked immediately.
USB Safely Remove did help, but maybe not directly when quickly clicking the drive in the main listing. When it showed me more than LockHunter would besides the *Metadata files in the root of the drive, there was also MsMpEng.exe operating on it.Forcing the stop of the files used by that process seemed to help me remove it.
For other drives or situations, I finally found Open Hardware Monitor seemed to have a lock on it, even when I haven't found other specific proof for that yet. I'd rather not close the program as I have to set my fan speed every time though.
Windows defines two main policies, Quick removal and Betterperformance, that control how the system interacts with externalstorage devices such as USB thumb drives or Thunderbolt-enabledexternal drives. Beginning in Windows 10 version 1809, the defaultpolicy is Quick removal.
Quick removal: This policy manages storage operations in a manner that keeps the device ready to remove at any time. You can remove thedevice without using the Safely Remove Hardware process. However, todo this, Windows cannot cache disk write operations. This may degradesystem performance.
Better performance: This policy manages storage operations in a manner that improves system performance. When this policy is ineffect, Windows can cache write operations to the external device.However, you must use the Safely Remove Hardware process to remove theexternal drive. The Safely Remove Hardware process protects theintegrity of data on the device by making sure that all cachedoperations finish.
I plugged in the USB flash drive before booting into windows 7 and I couldn't un-mout it (safely remove). After stopping the "Windows Search" service I could safely remove the drive. I only had the problem if the flash drive was connected to the computer before the Windows startup.
Possible solution for those with Everything Search:I've had this problem for years. Tried many suggestions and many apps, including Zentimo and USB Safely Remove.
Even disabling the indexing of file contents, and disabling the Windows Search service didn't help.
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.
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