I have no programs accessing anything on my external usb hd, and no explorer
windows or command prompts running. The activity light on the drive shows no
activity. When I click the "safely remove hardware" icon in the task tray
and click "safely remove usb mass storage device - drive (f:)" it says
"Windows can't stop your 'generic volume' device because it is in use." and
immediately the external drive goes into a flurry of activity with its
activity light staying on almost constantly. Windows resource monitor shows
that svchost is the culprit, reading the drive at about 2MB/sec
continuously. Sysinternals process explorer confirms that nothing besides
"System" and "svchost.exe" have any handles open for the drive. The disk
activity continues for several minutes, then stops. If I try "safely remove
hardware" again, it again refuses, and goes into another flurry of disk
activity. The result is that I can't safely remove the device, unless I shut
down the machine first, which kind of defeats the point of usb drives being
hot pluggable. This is infuriating.
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