External Hard Drive And "Safely Remove Hardware"

Sometimes, when I use "Safely Remove Hardware" (Win XP Pro) it will
say something to the effect of "Try again later" and I hear no activity in
the hard drive.
What risk (s) am I taking by diconnecting the drive when "Safely Remove"
says to wait ?? TIA

Hammer wrote:
> Sometimes, when I use "Safely Remove Hardware" (Win XP Pro) it will
> say something to the effect of "Try again later" and I hear no activity in
> the hard drive.
> What risk (s) am I taking by diconnecting the drive when "Safely Remove"
> says to wait ??

Data loss. Operations can be cached, and if you prematurely disconnect
your drive, they can be lost.

If you're using XP, get the Hardware Properties of the device in
question. (Right-click the drive in My Computer, Select Properties. Go
to the Hardware tab, select the drive again and click Properties
button.) On the Policies tab, you should find an option that marginally
controls the write caching for the drive. This may or may not alter the
way your drive behaves.

In article <ug7ck.241047$yE1.96932@attbi_s21>, grinder@no.spam.maam.com
says...
>
>
>Hammer wrote:
>> Sometimes, when I use "Safely Remove Hardware" (Win XP Pro) it will
>> say something to the effect of "Try again later" and I hear no activity in
>> the hard drive.
>> What risk (s) am I taking by diconnecting the drive when "Safely Remove"
>> says to wait ??
>
>Data loss. Operations can be cached, and if you prematurely disconnect
>your drive, they can be lost.
>
>If you're using XP, get the Hardware Properties of the device in
>question. (Right-click the drive in My Computer, Select Properties. Go
>to the Hardware tab, select the drive again and click Properties
>button.) On the Policies tab, you should find an option that marginally
>controls the write caching for the drive. This may or may not alter the
>way your drive behaves.


Thanks for your response. I did as you suggested and found the box indicating
"No caching" checked. So, hopefully, when I hear no activity, I can "safely"
remove the drive without losing data. Thanks, again.

Hammer wrote:
> Sometimes, when I use "Safely Remove Hardware" (Win XP Pro) it will
> say something to the effect of "Try again later" and I hear no activity in
> the hard drive.
> What risk (s) am I taking by diconnecting the drive when "Safely Remove"
> says to wait ?? TIA
>
>

I have never figured out the reason but with three 200gB homebuilt external
drives I never get the OK to remove them on the first go. But if I ask a
second time I invariably get the OS's blessing. There is no obvious reason
for this but since the data on these drives is important backups destined
for the bank vault I never take a chance and just blindly disconnect.

--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com

John McGaw wrote:

> Hammer wrote:
>
>> Sometimes, when I use "Safely Remove Hardware" (Win XP Pro) it will
>> say something to the effect of "Try again later" and I hear no
>> activity in the hard drive. What risk (s) am I taking by diconnecting
>> the drive when "Safely Remove" says to wait ?? TIA
>>
>>
>
> I have never figured out the reason but with three 200gB homebuilt
> external drives I never get the OK to remove them on the first go. But
> if I ask a second time I invariably get the OS's blessing. There is no
> obvious reason for this but since the data on these drives is important
> backups destined for the bank vault I never take a chance and just
> blindly disconnect.
>


It is not just the data that is involved. The orderly shutdown also
includes closing the file tables, updating the Windows Registry in
the host computer, etc., as well as flushing the caches.