Cannot safely remove external USB 3.0 drive with Win8.1

I'm unable to 'Safely remove' or 'Eject' external USB 3.0 drives (I have 2) on my Lenovo Thinkpad running Wndows 8.1 without having the computer claim that the drive needs to be scanned for errors when the drive is reconnected to the same laptop or attached to my desktop PC's.

When I connect the same drives to my desktop PC's USB3 ports I initially get the same "scan for errors" prompt. But any further attaching and removal of the same drives to either my Windows 7(64) and Vista (64) dsktop PCs's does not reproduce the same error and further safe removal and reconnecting to those 2 systems is error free.

When scanned for errors there has never been any errors discovered. The 2.5" drives (one Seagate the other WD) are in Vantec USB 3.0 external enclosures that use a '2x USB plugs' cable; one for data and one for power. My usual removal method is to click on the 'Windows Explorer Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media' icon on the Taskbar and select Eject for the drive and then wait until the 'Safe to remove' message pops up before removing the single cable attached to the external enclosure.

The USB Controllers are:

Intel(R) Series/C216 Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Coltroller - 1E26
Intel(R) Series/C216 Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Coltroller - 1E2D
Intel(R) USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller - 0100 (Microsoft)

I unsuccessfully tried updating the Intel(R) Series/C216 Chipset controller to v9.4.0.126 but it's still at v9.3.0.1011.

Has anyone else seen similar behaviour on their system and do you know if it's a USB 3.0 driver/firmware related, or a 'feature' of Windows 8.1?

I can live with the problem as I'm sure that the drive is not being removed while data is being written, and Indexing is disabled on external drives. But I prefer using a computer that does not exhibit these sort of problems.

Thanks for any info on a fix.

Russell

Device Manager->Right click on the USB3 external HD->Properties



Hope this helps

topgundcp said:

Device Manager->Right click on the USB3 external HD->Properties

Hope this helps

Click to expand...

That was the first thing I checked. Note that this behaviour does not occur with external USB 2.0 drives such as a WD MyBook that I just moved some files to. It really seems to be a USB 3.0 quirk.

I'll try using an external power source for the power plug of the USB 3.0 cable so I'm using only one USB port for data transfer to see if that makes a difference.

I recently upgraded to 8.1 and don't remember this happening with 8.0.

I've even tried using Hotswap!, which I use to safely unmount eSATA drives on my desktop system, and even it resulted in the same error.

Fwiw I just moved the ext. drive from my desktop, where it did not report any errors, and as soon as it's plugged into the laptop it claimed to be in need of scanning for errors. Both desktop systems (vista64/Win7) that it was used with just prior did not report any issues. BUT, after visiting his laptop Win 8.1 system I WILL get a 'scan for errors' prompt when bringing the HD back to either of those PC's. And that scan will result in 'no problems found'.

Strange ...

Russell

I just tried an external power supply for the 2nd USB 3.0 drive cable and it makes no difference. Same error occurs when I connect the drive.

But the 'silver lining' is that I discovered that the drive works fine with only the one (the thicker) USB 3 cable plugged in. So it seems this laptop supplies enough power from one USB 3.0 port to run the drive. Good news is that it frees up a USB port for other uses

Russell

what is the model of your laptop from lenovo a thinkpad what? are you sure its has chipset drivers for the 8.1 have you updated all of your drivers since upgrading. some drives geometry just sometimes seems to make windows unhappy if all your getting is the scan and fix or don't scan then i wouldn't worry about it your data should be safe. some of my flash drives in exfat do this.

Taking advantage of this post, I'm unable (80% of the times) to safely remove my USB 3.0 HDD external drive. It says always that I must close any program that is using it. How can I fix it without disable write cache. Windows should detect that there's no more movement between my HDD and anything else.

Thanks!