Have you ever wondered why you couldn’t eject a drive without rebooting? It’s not like it’s going to tell you what process is keeping it locked
Windows PowerToys has had this as a function for a long as I can remember. Before that there were programs which existed only to tell you what process was keeping a folder or drive open. On Linux lsof can do this for you.
Powertoys should be installed by default. Its a testament to how out of touch MS is that they leave all these great features as a little known optional install. Almost every single thing in power tools should be in windows outright.
I use it on any machine that I have to use windows on, and tell everyone I can about it. Just feels like such a miss to leave those features out of the OS
On top of this, it’s usually because the local cache hasn’t actually written all the data to the drive and if you go yanking the drive in this state, your most recent chunk of data would be missing or corrupt. The eject button forces your OS to clear its write cache before unmounting the file system.
It also happens from image preview caches created by explorer. I see this get hung up for some time with SMB shares and the like that have images.
Something is still interacting with the photos on your device, and although it may be mundane… do you really know every single service and process running on your device, all the time? Could we ever know? Just takes one dependency for one thing you installed to be bogus… it could even be from a rootkit installed in bios that installs whatever software on bootup so even if you wipe your system it’s there, ever monitoring, ever feeding your data away.
There’s just no user friendly tooling on windows that’s built-in which would ever pick this stuff up. AV doesn’t know what is desired or undesired behavior when it comes to stuff like this either. Sure, it won’t send up stuff protected by UAC from a non-admin request… but thumb drives, CF cards, SD cards etc all have no restrictions.
I have power toys… well on my windows dual boot anyway. Do normal users? Probably not.
I’ve used unlocker tools in the past as well, but this is not something provided in the OS and as such not something a typical user is even aware of, let alone has available.
You can just install it if you do need it to debug something on their pc though. There’s probably even portable versions you don’t have to install at all.
Windows PowerToys has had this as a function for a long as I can remember. Before that there were programs which existed only to tell you what process was keeping a folder or drive open. On Linux
lsofcan do this for you.Powertoys should be installed by default. Its a testament to how out of touch MS is that they leave all these great features as a little known optional install. Almost every single thing in power tools should be in windows outright.
I use it on any machine that I have to use windows on, and tell everyone I can about it. Just feels like such a miss to leave those features out of the OS
On top of this, it’s usually because the local cache hasn’t actually written all the data to the drive and if you go yanking the drive in this state, your most recent chunk of data would be missing or corrupt. The eject button forces your OS to clear its write cache before unmounting the file system.
But that’s a lot less of an exciting answer.
Hm, the way I remember it is that the cache being flushed showed a spinner before ejecting the drive. GP is referring to an actual error being shown.
It also happens from image preview caches created by explorer. I see this get hung up for some time with SMB shares and the like that have images.
Something is still interacting with the photos on your device, and although it may be mundane… do you really know every single service and process running on your device, all the time? Could we ever know? Just takes one dependency for one thing you installed to be bogus… it could even be from a rootkit installed in bios that installs whatever software on bootup so even if you wipe your system it’s there, ever monitoring, ever feeding your data away.
There’s just no user friendly tooling on windows that’s built-in which would ever pick this stuff up. AV doesn’t know what is desired or undesired behavior when it comes to stuff like this either. Sure, it won’t send up stuff protected by UAC from a non-admin request… but thumb drives, CF cards, SD cards etc all have no restrictions.
I have power toys… well on my windows dual boot anyway. Do normal users? Probably not.
I’ve used unlocker tools in the past as well, but this is not something provided in the OS and as such not something a typical user is even aware of, let alone has available.
You can just install it if you do need it to debug something on their pc though. There’s probably even portable versions you don’t have to install at all.
Yeah, File Locksmith from Power toys is great!