Cannot Safely Remove External Drives

thats what I always do, but when I click on the safely remove icon, I do not get any indication it is now safe to remove the device, which is typical.

Don't want to give my hardware specifications for privacy reasons, but I've found a solution for some users. I was having the same issue i.e. not being able to disconnect USB media, particularly storage devices. Here is what worked for me:

• Open the Disk Management utility by right-clicking the windows icon (other other various methods)
• Navigate to your external USB storage device
• Right-click the disk and there should be an option to take the drive "offline."
• Now you can eject your storage device from the little application in your "hidden icons" menu on the taskbar.
• Bam - Presto - Alakazam! You can safely remove your device.

Best guess at what's going on here is, as suggested in earlier posts on this thread, there's some kind of web-app like a cloud service or some other nonsense Microsoft's created that's keeping the read/write channels open for the device. Anyway, will work for at least some Windows 10 users.

Wish you all much success -- cheers.

For me, it was Windows Defender. I turned off "Real time protection", and I was able to safely remove USB device without the in-use message.

Mine is off as well, but that did not resolve it for me,,,

I have had this issue from the beginning of Win10 -predominantly a WD MyBook but a smaller WD would give that message and never be available for disconnect.
I use the Everything search software which can be a service as well as configured to run at start up within its options. An icon will appear in the ^hidden icons after first use.
I went into the Everything options and removed the choice to be available at start up since being a running service seemed to a double action. The icon now does not appear in that task notification area.
For the first time since Win10 was born the external drives immediately do the correct signal and can be disconnected.
IF the system search is the main tool then it might be that indexing needs to be turned off for external drives

Thanks for the tip, I only read though what you said real quick, so I did not digest it just yet but will give it a go soon and report back,,, thank you kindly!

Well, I have been living with this since the beginning and the pop up message does say something is accesing the drive but Taskmanager does not display activity. At least my situation has progressed from the total shut down being interrupted and a restart would occur because an external was plugged in during the early Win10 versions.
I don't use the Win10 search and I have attempted to cancel its indexing but Everywhere indexes and likely the recent backup files I put on the external...or whatever...is being noted by that search index.
I don't really have a scientific proof; it was just by chance that removing the double configuration because I didn't need it in that pop up box produced consistent 'safe to remove' signals. Its the first repeatable performance since July 2014. At least, it has worked for a week at this point.

Going into Services and restarting the Server service and/or the Computer Browser service has more often than not allowed the Safely Remove option to then work from the system tray for me. I don't know why it works, and I don't even know if it's safe to do, I just know that it seems to solve the problem and I've never had any problems caused by it. Btw, it's really annoying that Microsoft can't just solve this problem properly already, as it's been affecting me and others since at least Windows 7.

I shut down the Task Manager, now Safely Remove USB Drive works on WD My Book. I could always remove USB Drives.

bobjohn39 said:

I shut down the Task Manager, now Safely Remove USB Drive works on WD My Book. I could always remove USB Drives.

Same situation here... on my Windows 10 machine, thumb drives could always be safely removed by right-mouse clicking Eject from Windows Explorer.

However, WD Passport drives - and other mass storage devices - do not have the right-mouse click eject option available. So I would just use the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media icon, usually found in the Taskbar's Show Hidden Icons whenever a device was connected.

Then all of a sudden, I started getting the 'Problem Ejecting USB Mass Storage Device' alert during Passport ejection. Tracked it down to the fact that I recently began auto-launching Task Manager, which apparently maintains a process thread with mass storage devices and consequently throws the error alert.

I shut down Task Manager and boom... no longer receive any alerts during mass storage device removal.

BTW, running Task Manager has no impact on safely ejecting USB thumb drives.