12-22-06 06:17 AM
Bill Todd wrote:
> I'm starting to feel like an idiot for not being able to get Win2K to
> 'eject' an external USB drive that I got as a Christmas present for my
> wife and daughter. Each time I request that it be 'ejected' (to make it
> safe to remove it, presumably by flushing Win2K's internal file cache to
> it) it says "OK - safe now" and then a few seconds later restores the
> drive to accessibility and barks out stern warnings if I then switch off
> the drive (yes, if I hit the drive switch during those few seconds, no
> warning appears - but it's the sort of thing that makes one nervous).
>
> I can kind of understand what might be happening: since the system has
> to recognize the disk when its USB cable is inserted (or when it's
> powered up), there's some kind of polling going on, and after the drive
> has been 'ejected' the next time the polling interval expires the system
> rediscovers it. Still, one might expect something a tad more elegant -
> e.g., a slightly longer polling interval after an explicit ejection
> request, or the ability to recognize a *transition* in USB state (in
> this case, from "deactivated per request but still there" to "newly
> plugged in").
>
> Is this just how USB works on Windows? I dimly remember encountering
> something similar when I used an external USB enclosure on Win98SE, and
> may just have shrugged it off ('ejected' the drive and then ignored the
> subsequent warning when I powered it down after it had reappeared).
>
> Win2K Help wasn't helpful at all (describing device manager menu options
> that didn't exist). DM indicates that drive write-back cache is
> disabled (as well it should be, though I'd still expect some mechanism
> to enable it for special uses), but does not specify that the drive is
> removable (while some USB 'key' drives that my wife has appear to be
> listed as such - and I recall being able to control this on Win98SE).
>
> I can't believe that 15 minutes' worth of Googling on this didn't turn
> up *any* useful information - so thanks for any insights that might be
> forthcoming.
Win2K was a bit weird with USB storage devices, and "Eject" never did
seem to do much for me. Try using the removable media icon in the task
tray instead (looks like a flash card with an arrow over it), and use
the stop or remove function.
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