Trouble with a Portable Hard Drive. .

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Trouble with a Portable Hard Drive. .

Postby Mangafanatic » Sun Apr 09, 2006 7:44 pm

Well, my dad got a 2.0 gig portable hard drive to help us transfer a bunch of stuff to a new computer (and just for general purposes). However, I've come against a bit of a road block. See, I hooked it up, got what I wanted onto it, then transferred it onto the second computer. No problemo. And then it happened--

So, I am now ready to remove the portable hard drive from the computer. However, when I click the "safely remove hardware" button and try to close the portable hard drive in order that I can go ahead and remove it-- I get the following warning: "The device 'Generic volume' cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later.' Now, maybe it's just me, but whenever my computer tells me "try again later", I get worried. I tried restarting my computer, but I simply recieved the same message.

Any ideas on what to do? I don't want to just remove the thing without closing it. I figure that would mess it up, but, then again, I don't know that much about portable drives, since I've never used one before. So, has this ever happened to anyone else? Any advice on how I can close it?

Thanks for any help you guys can offer me.
Every year in Uganda, innumerable children simply. . . disappear. These children all stolen under the cover of darkness from their homes and impressed into the guerilla armies of the LRA [Lord's Resistance Army]. In the deserts of Uganda, they are forced to witness the mindless slaughter of other children until they themselves can do nothing but kill. Kill. These children, generally ranging from ages 5-12, are brainwashed into murdering in the name of the resistance and into stealing other children from their beds to suffer the same fate.

Because of this genocide of innocence, hundred and hundreds of children live every night sleeping in public places miles from their homes, because they know that if the do not-- they will disappear. They will become just another number in this genocide to which the international community has chosen to turn a blind eye. They will become, in affect, invisible-- Invisible Children.

But there are those who are trying to fight against this slaughter of Uganda's children. They fight to protect these "invisible children." Please, help them help a country full of children who know nothing by fear. Help save the innocence. For more information concerning how you can help and how you can get an incredible video about this horrific reality, visit the Invisible Children home page.
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Postby Slater » Sun Apr 09, 2006 8:11 pm

the drive's doing something. Just let your computer sit without doing anything to it for an hour or two and then retry. If it doesn't work then... well... that's gonna be a little harder.
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Postby Puritan » Sun Apr 09, 2006 8:22 pm

Make sure to close any running programs or windows as having anything access the drive can cause this problem. Also make sure to close everything in the task bar at the bottom of the screen. If that doesn't help, you could take Slater's advice or just save everything and shut down the machine. Unplugging things while the machine is off won't cause any problems.
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Postby Kaligraphic » Sun Apr 09, 2006 11:45 pm

You can still physically remove the drive, the issue is that your computer sees something on the drive as being in use, most likely. It usually won't hurt anything to just disconnect the drive anyway, it's just not the "clean" way of doing things and you should, of course, do things "properly" whenever possible.
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Postby Mangafanatic » Mon Apr 10, 2006 12:16 pm

Okay, I let the drive sit over night and this morning it allowed me to remove it. Thanks a million, guys!
Every year in Uganda, innumerable children simply. . . disappear. These children all stolen under the cover of darkness from their homes and impressed into the guerilla armies of the LRA [Lord's Resistance Army]. In the deserts of Uganda, they are forced to witness the mindless slaughter of other children until they themselves can do nothing but kill. Kill. These children, generally ranging from ages 5-12, are brainwashed into murdering in the name of the resistance and into stealing other children from their beds to suffer the same fate.

Because of this genocide of innocence, hundred and hundreds of children live every night sleeping in public places miles from their homes, because they know that if the do not-- they will disappear. They will become just another number in this genocide to which the international community has chosen to turn a blind eye. They will become, in affect, invisible-- Invisible Children.

But there are those who are trying to fight against this slaughter of Uganda's children. They fight to protect these "invisible children." Please, help them help a country full of children who know nothing by fear. Help save the innocence. For more information concerning how you can help and how you can get an incredible video about this horrific reality, visit the Invisible Children home page.
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Postby Mr. SmartyPants » Mon Apr 10, 2006 6:45 pm

That stuff happens all the time, and expect it to happen a lot XD You should simply be able to remove the USB cord out. It's not going to damage your harddrive. (In most cases, I just pull out storage volumes without "safetly" doing so) Only exception being if you're still transfering something back or forth.
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Postby Puritan » Mon Apr 10, 2006 6:55 pm

While it won't damage the hard drive if nothing is being transfered, I have seen it cause the computer to stop recognizing the device when it is plugged in, so I wouldn't suggest removing the device without stopping it first except as a last resort. Simply shut down the machine or wait instead.
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Postby Mithrandir » Mon Apr 10, 2006 8:22 pm

Yeah...

* If you can shut the machine off, then unplug it, the turn the machine back on it should be fine.

* If you are not activly transfering data to it, just unplug it.
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Postby Icarus » Mon Apr 10, 2006 9:48 pm

I just unplugged it once.... It crashed the computer.
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Postby Kaligraphic » Tue Apr 11, 2006 5:44 pm

I'd say if you're going to unplug it without safely dismounting it, it's good practice to wait a minute or three in case Windows has a cached operation it's waiting to do.

But then, I don't particularly trust Windows.
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Postby Mithrandir » Tue Apr 11, 2006 6:27 pm

Icarus wrote:I just unplugged it once.... It crashed the computer.

I'm sorry, but:

:lol:

I wouldn't trust a computer that I couldn't pull an external drive off of without crashing it.
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Postby Kaligraphic » Tue Apr 11, 2006 7:58 pm

I don't think I've ever crashed a computer by unplugging a removable drive.

I have seen one crash from plugging in a mouse, but that was a rather messed-up installation. (no, it wasn't my fault)
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Postby Icarus » Thu Apr 13, 2006 1:39 pm

Mithrandir wrote:I wouldn't trust a computer that I couldn't pull an external drive off of without crashing it.



I don't really trust it either (WinXP, proccessor < 1GHz, 256MB mem). Yeah, not a good machine.
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Postby Arnobius » Thu Apr 13, 2006 1:49 pm

Icarus wrote:I don't really trust it either (WinXP, proccessor < 1GHz, 256MB mem). Yeah, not a good machine.

Can XP even operate less than a Ghz?
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Postby Mr. SmartyPants » Thu Apr 13, 2006 9:57 pm

AnimeHeretic wrote:Can XP even operate less than a Ghz?

Is Icarus' computer even "operating" or is it "sort-of-operating".
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