Cannot safely remove portable hdd

[lister]

Hello, first post here!

Unsurprisingly, I have a problem safely removing a portable 320gb NTFS hdd (S:\ ) on Vista Premium.

I checked the drive with a prog called 'unlocker' and it seems that svchost.exe is locking certain files. eg:

S:\system volume information\tracking.log
S:\
S:\$extend$\$objid

Tried a couple of formats and they didn't help. As soon as I did a bit of work with them (open, saves, deletes etc.) the same thing occured.

So far the only thing that's guaranteed to work is to shut down the laptop.

I wish I could use Fat32 but it would take 2 partitions and I wouldn't be able to format within Vista or the native XP format.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Rawko]

u would suggest you to have a hard disk cleaner run on hdd which will help you to clean registry of your hdd

[amit shah]

I was also facing such king of issue i tried to have a Virus Scan and it worked for me hope it will work for you too.

[deoWo]

To configure drive for quick removal, Open Device Manager, expand "Disk drives" node, double click drive in question, on the Policies tab make sure "Optimize for quick removal" radio-button is checked. This will slow down file operations on the drive but will allow you to remove it at any moment without even using (sometimes failing) "Safe Removal" function.

[Myron]

svchost.exe is a target for malware.

You need all 3 of these programs: AVG antispyware, Ad-Aware and Spybot.

AVG Anti-Spyware
http://free.avg.com/download-avg-ant...d-anti-rootkit

Ad-Aware
http://www.lavasoft.de/

Spybot Search & Destroy 1.6.2
http://www.filehippo.com/download_sp...earch_destroy/

For more information on svchost.exe please go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sec...ry/927891.mspx

[lister]

deoWo:
I know the quick removal option, but was hoping to see why Vista was not releasing it first.

Myron:
It's nor a virus as it exhibited the same behaviour after a fresh install of Vista on a new hdd.

rawko:
I never use reg cleaners. I'd never recommend anyone else use them either.