Unable to 'safely remove' external hard drive

Hi

I believe this is a common problem but haven't had any success in finding a solution so far. I am running Vista Home Premium SP1

I have an Iomega 320 gig external hard drive used to store music /pictures/ video files/games etc. When I want to power down my pc if I click on the safely remove hardware icon I get an error message saying that it is unable to do this as the volume is in use close all open files etc. Well it's not in use, I may turn it on but might not access it at all, neither is system restore turned on on this device, nor is it included in any scheduled tasks such as virus scanning (I do all that manually on this drive) I have made sure that write caching is disabled (even though I would prefer it switched on) and I still can't eject this drive.

This problem never occured when I ran XP on this PC with the same external drive.

Thanks

Hmm.. Do you close all of the contents of your External before you decide to "safely remove" it? Are there still anything relating to it still on?

If not; it might still be running it's software in your Task manager. Try to find what process that is, and try to terminate it. *Make sure it isn't A NETWORK OR SYSTEM* process.

No there's nothing running

Probably a BIOS Setting issue. I'm not how to see those BIOS thing, hopefully someone will come along (Louis) and help you with that.
Sorry.

I think it's running the software which controls the drive, so XP considers it in use.

I can't say for sure, since I've never really paid attention to the safely remove icons or procedures. I don't have any flash drives and I haven't used an external hard drive in about 2 years (I just attach them to the motherboard or a controller card).

But it should not have anything to do with BIOS settings, IMO.

Louis

Through trial and error - I think I have it sussed out now, not a solution but a reason why.

there was no indexing, no scheduled scans, no write caching enabled, it was optimised for quick removal and I still couldn't safely remove it, however my antivirus was running, so I turned it off temporarily and tried to safely remove hardware and Hey Presto! it worked. Turned the AV back on again and wouldn't work again. Tried turning AV on and off a few times and the AV is the culprit.

If I want to power down completely now I'll turn the AV off, not an ideal solution. X Activa.