How to force dismount of ultrabay drive?

[Nolonemo]

I have a T23 and T61, both running XP Pro SP3, I have ultrabay hard drives for both. With both machines, sometimes when I click on the "remove hardware" icon in the status bar to stop the ultrabay drive so I can remove it, I get a message saying "the device cannot be stopped right now, try again later," or something to that effect. This sometimes happens even if I have not recently accessed anything on the ultrabay drive recently.

Is there some way to force a dismount of the drive so I can remove it quickly? Right now, I have to reboot to be able to remove it when this happens. (If I just pull out the drive XP will not recognize the new ultrabay device I swap in.)

Thanks

[basketb]

Have you tried closing all of your open applications? Recently, I needed to close Firefox before I could eject the ultrabay drive, even though I did not explicitly access the drive from within Firefox.

Another possibility, does your ultrabay hard drive have a password? That always gave me problems as well, so I removed the password.

Also (though do this at your own risk), you could put your Thinkpad in sleep mode and then remove the ultrabay device.

[rkawakami]

When I get that message it usually means that some program is still in memory which has accessed the drive. Said program will not have any visible icon on the taskbar or system tray. Bringing up Windows Task Manager and scanning the Processes list for a familiar name (i.e., wmplayer.exe; Windows Media Player) and killing the process usually takes care of the problem.

[Nolonemo]

Thanks Ray, I'll try that, makes sense. The puzzling thing was that this was happening with all windows closed, and no indication of drive activity on any drive. Very annoying.

[rkawakami]

Many times I have seen problems like this. Either you can't get control over the drive or you try launching a program which you know works but it doesn't. In cases involving media players, it's usually an attempt at playing a corrupt file which seems to cause the program to remain in memory (despite all visible signs that it's not running). Killing the little bugger from TaskMan is my solution. It does involve some understanding of what are the "normal" processes that should be running.