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After using the answers to this question: Can Windows tell me what is using my USB drive?, I found from Event Viewer that Task Manager was using the drive:

The application \Device\HarddiskVolume5\Windows\System32\Taskmgr.exe 
with process id 3708 stopped the removal or ejection for the device
USB\VID_0480&PID_A00C\20150207045837.

After closing Task manager I was able to "Safely Remove Hardware".

Does anybody know why Taskmgr would stop removal of the drive?

1 Answer 1

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Having had this happen to me just now and realizing the same thing you did about the cause "taskmgr.exe" (the Windows task manager you open with Ctrl-Shift-Esc), I'd speculate that it is caused by its monitoring of each drive on the performance tab that is triggering the internal monitoring and locking the drive out, presumably because they haven't yet programmed a graceful way for the system to signal the drive wants to be ejected OR, more likely, there is a way, but it wasn't used in Task Manager because 1) task manager is ephemeral and can be easily closed to fix the issue and 2) because it possibly doesn't respond dynamically to hardware changes visually (i.e. they never made/expected it to be on 24/7, sitting resident while devices of the classes/types it monitors (namely drives in this instance) are added/removed) and therefore they decided there was no point having it have the capability lower down when visually it would break. And of course 3) there's never enough time to implement all of the features you want. But there... that's the best I can do and I'd imagine I'm about as close to it as anyone will get unless they dig through exactly what Task Manager is doing at a lower level.

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