I don’t fucking know why I can’t eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don’t know who’s lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.
Windows has that button, but only if you right-click the drive in file explorer and select “eject”. The dialog is very similar, but has the option to continue anyways. That option doesn’t appear when ejecting from the taskbar.
Which is weird, because it means that Microsoft went out of their way to make two different, almost identical dialogs. And they made the better one harder to reach.
Either that or they were added at different times by two different teams with two different design philosophies.
It’s definitely that one
Incredible intel. Thanks!
I use AMD, but thank you.
Antivirus, Windows Defender, Bitlocker…
Shall I continue?
Try OpenFilesViewer and Process Explorer, amongst a myriad of other SysInternals utilities…
Told ya, Process Explorer just told me nothing, except Dropbox maybe.
But it doesn’t change the usage scenario. I don’t care what programs are using the drive. I just need to tell them to fuck off, I need to unplug this drive at this moment.
Whelp, time to shut down the whole computer! (Or just yank it and hope you didn’t do anything bad, lol)
Not 99%. Windows has many usability issues. I’d vote for “dont steal focus and stick windows in front of where I’m typing” and “don’t move things just as I go to click on them” for a start, and also “don’t somehow take an hour to delete 50 files.”
Deleting files was an amazing one already. Then I recently discovered the joy of deleting 30k emails from Outlook… T-T
I copied 400GB of assorted files in an RDP session today and Windows had to think for a minute or two, then copy them ever so slowly, then stop at 99% done, then crash Explorer and disable the start menu and taskbar and CTRL-ALT-DEL and all ways of getting to the Task Manager, and then freeze the whole machine so that I had to travel to the physical machine and hold down the power button, since when it has been unusably slow because Windows now wants to rebuild the RAID array, which takes days. This was a pretty average Windows session.
How is linux handle such situations, i’m new using it and haven’t looked that up yet, well i didn’t got in such a situation yet, but i only used a handful of time a external hard drive
Basically, if you, as a regular user, cannot unmount a device, you can usually just go to root shell (
sudo -i), see where the thing is mounted (just usemount) and then unmount it (umount /media/blah/floop). If it says the device is still busy, as root you can remount it as read-only and then unmount it (seeking documentation left as an exericise to the reader, as I’m sitting at a Windows system now).There’s also
lsof(“list open files”) tool, which can be used to see which exact programs are using files on that device, which you can then use to kill those sneaky processes (ps,kill).So a complicated set of terminal commands and alternatives you need to have memorized ahead of time. That’s definitely the linux solution. You can do it, but no average user would ever be able to when they need it.
Windows probably has some equally complicated way of finding what is locking a file/folder… or you can just install File Locksmith which is a Microsoft PowerToys tool, and just have it in the context menu everywhere.
So a complicated set of terminal commands and alternatives you need to have memorized ahead of time. That’s definitely the linux solution. You can do it, but no average user would ever be able to when they need it.
As a point of contrast. In Linux Mint you press the eject button. That’s it.
The other guy was getting into more detail for people who want it.
