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Question

Can't eject external hard drive in Windows Vista

by Nov 29, 2012 11:37AM PST

When I try to safely eject my Western Digital external hard drive using the icon in the taskbar, I get a message that says the drive can't be stopped because it's in use by a Windows program. Well, to my knowledge, when I try to eject the drive, there are no other programs accessing the drive. The only way I can shut down the drive is to shut down the computer. I'm running Windows Vista on a desktop PC.

However, when I use the same external hard drive on my laptop running Windows XP, the drive ejects without any problem.

It's really a pain to have to shut down the computer every time I want to eject the external drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Discussion is locked

3 Posts
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Answer
Same here.
by Former Forum moderator Nov 29, 2012 2:14PM PST

In my case it was my antivirus. So I uninstalled that, changed to another maker and all good. Some folk can't pull the trigger so I understand that.
Bob

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How did you determine it was the antivirus?
by keng331 Nov 30, 2012 1:42AM PST

Thanks for the response. How did you determine it was your antivirus that was causing the problem?

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The old scientific method.
by r. proffitt Former Forum moderator Nov 30, 2012 1:56AM PST

Install it. Notice the failure. Uninstall it, it works. To be sure I repeated this.

It's not a big deal as we have other choices today.

It's possible there is some setting but I like using my PC and again, there are other solutions.
Bob

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