The Device Generic volume cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device later

[ian elliot]

I have myself a portable HD which i keep all my digital photos stored, occasionally when i try to use the "safely remove hardware" icon, i'll get the above warning, this makes me rather nervous as i dont want to damage the HD,
Looking on the net, i read that sometimes this happens when a file on the portable is being used on the PC at the same time, but other than photos, the only thing stored is a previous install of FS9, im moving over planes, scenery, ect a bit of a time to a fresh install on my PC. but ive looked at my Windows task manager and nothing's running anyway.
I also read that you can just shut down your PC and remove the storage device when cold, but im not sure about that either. any thoughts guys.
cheers ian

[rohan]

Ian,
I have a few Maxtor external USB drives on which I keep all my backups. Every now and then, I get that same message, in which case I simply wait until I shut down the PC before disconnecting the drive, and avoid any further use of that drive until then. The next time I have that drive connected, I run a "chkdsk /v /f" on it. Apart from getting the message, I've never seen anything untoward in using one of these drives or copying to / from it.

I've also occasionally seen the message when disconnecting a USB stick drive. Same results ...

Oh, and that comment about the drive being in use by something else - utter balderdash. The o/s may think it's true, but that doesn't make it so. All it means is that the o/s didn't clean up after itself properly when the last I/O finished. I've even seen that situation arise with the data partitions on my internal drive when I've been using a DOS prompt.

Hope that helps,
Ro

[ian elliot]

thanks Ro, you've put my mind at ease a little.
cheers ian

[Dangerousdave26]

That is an indication that something on your computer is still accessing the drive.

Lets say you opened a picture and looked at it with some type of picture viewer. Now you have closed the picture but left the view open. The viewer will not disconnect from the drive so you can not safely eject it.

I had this happen today when I had a program running on a PC that never accessed the drive but still I could not remove it until I shut that software down.

Its hard to tell what it could be. It might also be your Anti Virus software running a scan on the drive peeking in to see what kind of malware is there waiting to bite you.

In any event its a matter of shutting down the program that is accessing the drive. Finding the program in question can be the difficult part.

In most cases I would just choose to do what rohan said. Wait to remove it until you shut down.