Hi everybody.

I have the 2020 BIAB hdd and am using the split system, running BIAB from the C drive, and accessing the sounds from the hdd. I'm on Windows 7. I haven't used the program much, so still very much a beginner, have barely used it since I got the hard drive, and I haven't used it at all in a couple of years.

My question is, the HDD is seen by Windows as an unremovable drive (U - I don't remember now if it came that way, with the letter U assigned, or if I did that myself). It's listed as Disk 1, under Disk 0 (which is the OS on C: drive) in Computer Management.

Because it's "not removable" I can't use the Safely Remove and Eject. When I try, tt always says "Windows can't stop your 'Generic Volume' device because a program is still using it ..." Of course there's nothing open.

After several hours of google research, I understand now that it's because an HDD is not seen as removable, but treated like an internal hard drive, even though it's USB. I've read in multiple places that this is not changeable. (A few rabbit trails, indicating it is, lead to not so good results, super old info, etc.)

Apparently the only way to safely remove the HDD is shutting down the computer and then unplugging it. But I normally leave my Windows 7 desktop running or in standby. I rarely turn it off.

I don't want the HDD to be constantly plugged in, as I'm not going to be using it very often. I'm extremely leary of just unplugging it anyway, in spite of the "warning" because I've been down that road before.

Some years ago, I had lots of pics on a Passport HDD that got corrupted by doing that. It came up as "RAW - 0 bytes" in windows and wasn't readable. I was able to use some data recovery tool to save most of the pics and save them to a new HDD, but was a huge PITA, and no filenames are preserved. Don't want to repeat that.

What does everybody else who bought a BIAB hard drive do?

I don't think your disk is non-removable. I think you probably assigned the disk the letter U at some point. This is a trick that some people use with external hard disks to force them to have the same letter when you disconnect and reconnect them. This way, a file can always be accessed using the same path, like U:\bb\bbw64.exe, instead of G:\bb\bbw64.exe one day and H:\bb\bbw64.exe the next.

If you assign a high drive letter, windows is less likely to change it the next time you plug the drive in, even if you've been plugging in other devices in the mean-time. Right-click on the Windows flag / 'start menu' and click Disk Management, and you can then right-click on your external hard disk and 'change drive letter / path'.

Windows being unable to eject your disk 'because there is a program using it' is a very common problem. Even if you don't have any Explorer windows open, and there doesn't appear to be any visible program running, there might be some background process using the drive - for example an antivirus program running a scan among a long list of other techy things. This is something that I think improved in Windows 10. Typically, Windows will now usually give the "ok" to eject a device on the second try even if it fails on the first - not sure of the reason behind that.

Personally, I would not leave the computer running all the time. Shutting it off lets it cool off and rest, and clears the cashe from it's day to day business of record keeping.


I run an older machine with XP Pro 32 and have it set up in the way you describe but without the designated drive number. Since the computer is always run with the same stuff connected and I occasionally pop in a USB thumb drive..... nothing ever changes with the HDD for PG. It always appears as the same drive number/letter.

I have also disconnected the HDD with the machine running and there were no issues.

Hi - thanks for taking the time to answer. Yes, you are right. I'm pretty sure I probably set the drive letter, so that BIAB could find the files every time. It was awhile back so my memory is fuzzy, but I think at the time, I was working on pictures on another external drive, so wanted each to maintain its own letter. I'm not sure if I should try to change it back at this point. I don't want to have to change the prefs in BIAB to tell it where to find the real tracks, every time the computer auto-assigns a different letter each time I plug it in.

From my research online, it seems a lot of folks are having the issue that these days external hard drives being seen as "non-removable" anyway, even if they didn't assign a letter, as opposed to flash drives. As I said, I'm a bit nervous about it, since windows corrupted one of my eternal drives before. I was just curious how others who are using the BIAB drive are handling this. I know some people run the BIAB program from their external drive. I'm curious about others who have the program on C drive and keeping the real tracks on the BIAB hard drive.

Thanks again for your response. It's one of the things that makes the BIAB forums so great.

As an aside, there are two kinds of caching: read caching and write caching. The one that can really cause problems is write caching. Things can get scrambled if something is written to the write cache but not committed to the drive.

Anyone remember MS-DOS v4? That piece of software junk not only introduced write caching, it turned it on by default. Lots of peeps who upgraded to DOS 4 got corrupted DBase III databases after that, when they just powered down their PC without flushing the write cache first. Mickeysoft added that feature and didn't really publicize it. But turning it on by default? Super bad idea. I was running real-time SCADA (supervisory control) databases and customers were upgrading their DOS from v3 to v4 and getting corrupted databases. That one took me awhile to figure out. I kept shipping DOS 3.3 until DOS 5 was released. DOS 4 sucked big time.

As far as losing stuff with a bad drive eject -
Personally, I keep all my RT/RD stuff an a drive separate from C:
I use a separate internal drive, so my answer may be a little different than your question.. but same principle applies
That way the original drive is left intact and not used unless needed for a catastrophic restore situation (which I have been lucky not to have to do so far).

Same thing could be done with a second USB external drive .. copy what you need to that and use it as needed, but keep an original copy on-hand
Of course, all your original RTs are safely in your account at PGMusic, so if it *really came down to it you could re-download everything, but that would be quite time-consuming in a pinch.

"Windows can't stop your 'Generic Volume' device because a program is still using it...

The problem you mention has happened to me a few times, especially when I delete things from that drive and then do not delete it from the recycle bin.

Maybe that's what's happening to you. Before unplugging the drive delete the contents of the recycle bin if you have sent something there. since I do it always lets me disconnect safely.

Greetings

Harddrives are also safe to remove while the computer is completely turned off, so that is an option as well.