How to safely remove a USB drive when "Windows can't stop your 'Generic volume' device because a program is still using it."?
Look for RemoveDrive on this page (direct link to the Drive Tools page RemoveDrive tool section).
Those pages also have good related information.
The RemoveDrive tool is useful also when
you Do not get ‘Safely remove’ option in Tray for USB storage devices.
Often this will be because the drive is being indexed; right click the drive>properties, and uncheck index. Or the AV is monitoring the drive - turn off AV to test this.
There are several reasons to USB being undismountable:
- It's in use. Please note that if you're looking at the disk in Explorer, then it's in use!
- Windows is finishing copying a big file to or from the disk (rarely the reason)
- A bug in Windows causes conime.exe to get stuck on the disk (it may safely be killed)
- If the USB drive is formatted as NTFS, the journal of all file updates may still be open
- If disk indexing is on for the drive, Windows may be furiously indexing all files on it
My advice is to:
- Make sure the USB drive is not defined as indexed.
- Wait, and then try again. It might work a few seconds later on.
- Buy Zentimo ($29.90) that does a good job of trying to remove the disk. Even if it fails, it still tells you which programs are using what files (I paid).