[mikeloeven]

I noticed that when error checking a hard drive on your computer you get a force dismount option provided the drive in question is not a system drive.

any way i ran into a problem trying to clone a drive apparently my cloning software cant lock the drive due to something that starts accessing it immediately upon mounting. my question is is there a manual method to manually force dismount a drive so my cloning utility can lock it or at the very least remove active handels

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There is a way to force a dismount using command prompt, but knowing what cloning utility you are using would help (?)

[Akabilk]

There is a way to force a dismount using command prompt, but knowing what cloning utility you are using would help (?)

[SRX660]

I don't know if this works cause i have not had to try it, but you can try this.

Microsoft provides a utility called devcon for free download. It's a "Command Line Uility Alternative to Device Manager". It can actually do many things that I won't get into here, but removing a plug & play device is a simple operation once you know the unique name of the device you want to manipulate.

After you've downloaded devcon, run "devcon status *" in a command window. This will generate a list of all the devices on your system. Look for the line which describes your device. In my case for my external hard drive the (very cryptic) line looks like this:

SBP2\MAXTOR&ONETOUCH&LUN0\0010B9F700AFC279 That full line is a bit much but any substring that remains unique will do. I have another maxtor drive on my system but nothing else that has the phrase "sbp2\maxtor" so I'll use that. The command to safely remove my external drive then becomes:

devcon remove sbp2\maxtor* The "*" at the end is a wildcard and matches the rest of the string.


SRX660

[mikeloeven]

it isn't plug and play well it is kinda plug and play but it is a hot swap sata bay designed for raids but i use it for removable storage but it doesn't have a safely remove button and removing the device would make the program not see it at all i need the device active but dismounted eg available for raw access

Edited by mikeloeven, 02 December 2011 - 11:35 AM.