This post discusses "Problem ejecting external hard drive" error and provides several solutions to help you safely remove hard drive like USB. If you cannot eject external hard drive in use, try following these methods to remove them easily.
An external drive is just a hard drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) that is connected to a computer on the outside rather than on the inside. Some external drives draw power over their data cable, which of course comes from the computer itself, while others may require an AC wall connection to derive power on their own. USB is one of the most commonly used external hard drives.
What Happens If You Don’t Safely Remove External Hard Drive?
To keep your data in the external hard drive safe and prevent the external hard drive from being damaged, it’s advised that you close all programs, files and processes in the external hard drive before you eject it.
Then right-click the external hard drive icon and choose “Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media” to eject it.
If you ever forced to eject the external hard drive on Windows 10, and find some important data on it get lost or the hard drive becomes corrupted and inaccessible, you can rescue your data in external hard drive by using the most easy-to-use data recovery tool below.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery, professional data recovery software compatible with Windows 10/8/7, enables you to easily recover lost data or mistakenly deleted files from external hard drive. You can also use this tool to recover data from formatted, failed, corrupted or logically damaged external hard drive with ease.
However, if your external hard drive is physically damaged and can’t be accessed, then any data recovery software can’t help you, you can send the drive to professional repair store to seek help.
Free download and install MiniTool Power Data Recovery on your Windows 10/8/7 computer, and follow the 3 simple steps below to easily recover data from external hard drive, working for data loss when you can’t eject external hard drive Windows 10 and you force to eject it.
Step 1. Connect External Hard Drive to Computer
At first, you can connect your external hard drive to computer.
If your external hard drive is not recognized when connecting to Windows 10, you can check this post for some solutions: Fix External Hard Drive Not Showing Up or Recognized.
Then you can launch MiniTool Power Data Recovery to enter into its main interface. As you can see, its interface is very simple and intuitive.
Step 2. Choose the External Hard Drive to Scan
You can click Hard Disk Drive from the left pane, and choose your external hard drive device under Hard Diskfrom the right window.
Click the orange Scan button at the bottom-left corner, and this best data recovery software will start automatically scanning data (incl. deleted and lost data) on the external hard drive.
Step 3. Check and Recover Data from External Hard Drive
After it finishes the scan process, it will list all recoverable data in the scan result window.
Check the scan result for desired data and files, choose them and click Save button to specify a destination path to store the recovered files.
It’s advised you store the recovered files to a new device but not the original external hard drive to avoid data overwriting.
Therefore, when you are facing “Can’t eject external hard drive Windows 10” issue, and suffer data loss because of a forced ejection. You can try this way to recover lost data.
Below are some solutions that help you fix can’t eject external hard drive Windows 10 error. You can try them one by one to safely eject external hard drive when meeting problem ejecting USB mass storage device on Windows 10.
Can’t Eject External Hard Drive Windows 10? Method 1. Restart or Turn Off Computer
If you can’t eject the external hard drive, you can reboot or turn off your computer, and this will close all programs and processes to make sure no programs are using the files on the external hard drive. After your computer restarts or turns off, you can try to eject the external hard drive.
Method 2. Run Windows Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter
In case your external hard drive has some hardware issues, you can run Windows built-in free Hardware and Devices troubleshooter to detect and fix problems with connected devices and hardware to see if it can fix can’t eject external hard drive Windows 10 problem.
Method 3. Update USB Drivers
If you frequently meet the error “Can’t eject external hard drive Windows 10”, then you should consider if your computer USB drivers are outdated or corrupted. To eliminate this cause, you can follow the steps below to update USB drivers on Windows 10 computer.
Method 4. Use Task Manager to End Tasks in Windows 10
Since you don’t know for sure which program or process is using files on the external hard drive in the background, you can use Windows Task Manager to view and end all suspicious tasks on Windows 10 to see if it can fix can’t eject external hard drive Windows 10 error.
Method 5. Eject External Hard Drive with Disk Management
If you can’t eject external hard drive Windows 10, you can try to use Windows Disk Management tool to eject the device.
To learn about the detailed stpes of these 5 methods, you can check out post Solutions to Can’t Eject External Hard Drive on Windows 10.
Manage Your External Hard Drive
If your external hard drive has problems and can’t work well, you can reformat hard drive and reuse it after recovering or backing up data on it.
No matter you want to manage, format or partition external hard drive, you can use the best free hard drive partition manager – MiniTool Partition Wizard – to easily accomplish it.
MiniTool Partition Wizard not only allows you to create/resize/extend/copy/delete/format/wipe hard drivepartition, but also lets you convert hard disk between MBR and GPT, NTFS and FAT. You can also use it to check file system errors and scan bad sectors on hard drive.
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