External Hard Drive Won't Eject Safely on Windows, How to Fix

The warning appears when I attempt to eject my external hard drive 'This thing is in use right now. Try again after closing any open windows or programs using the device.' After receiving the notification, I rebooted the computer three times, and it still reports that there are no programs using the device.

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Dany· Answered on Mar 10, 2023

If your external hard drive has hardware issues, you can use Windows' free Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter to find and fix issues with linked devices and hardware to see if it can resolve the Windows 10 issue of being unable to eject an external hard disk.

Step 1. Click "Start" - "Settings". Please select "Update & Security".

Step 2. The following step is to choose "Troubleshoot" from the left pane, scroll down to the "Hardware and Devices "category, and then click that.

Step 3. Make a hit When you press the troubleshooter button, Windows will immediately look into hardware and linked device issues.

If you've tried the method mentioned above but still can't find the right answer. It's time for you to employ the best strategy, and disk manager will be able to assist you with that. You may manage all the devices linked to your computer using the disk manager, a feature of Windows. If "Safely remove Hardware and Eject media" does not allow you to successfully eject the external hard drive, utilize disk manager to complete the operation. The steps to complete the task are as follows:

Step 1. To begin, open the start menu, type "Disk management," and then click Enter.

Step 2. Next, you need to find the external hard disk that you want to expel.

Step 3. Next, use your right-click mouse to pick "Eject" from the menu when selecting the external hard drive.

Step 4. One thing you must remember is that the external hard drive will show up as "Offline" when you eject it. Because of this, make sure to set the state of the external hard drive in Disk management to "Online" before using it on the computer again.

If you've ever had to forcely remove an eject hard drive from Windows 10 and discovered that some crucial data was lost or that the disk had become corrupted, you may recover your data using the most powerful data recovery software. Here, we recommend EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, which is friend-to-use and professional.

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Tutorials on how to recover lost, deleted, or formatted data from HDD, SSD, USB, SD card, or other storage media on Windows and Mac.

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