Simple Solutions for USB Storage Problems

Remove drives safely, speed up thumb drives, and force Windows to recognize troublesome disks. Our expert answers your most pressing USB storage questions.

Be they flash drives or external hard drives, USB storage devices are wonderful. You just plug them in and they work.

Unless, of course, they don't.

Here I answer three reader questions about USB drives that don't quite plug and play.

--Stan Grant, Lodi, Ohio

It would be nice if, rather than just telling you that the drive can't be safely removed, Windows bothered to say why. Sadly, it doesn't.

So what can you do in this situation? Windows recommends--via a dialog box--that you wait and try again, and that often works. But while you're waiting, check your taskbar and system tray for programs that might be running files off the USB drive. Close any such programs.

In fact, close programs that were running files off that drive, even if you've already closed those files.

Still no luck? Try Task Manager, using these steps:

1. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete. If you're using Vista, follow that by clicking Start Task Manager.

2. Click the Processes tab.

3. Examine the list of processes, looking for anything that could be from that drive--for instance, a process with a name similar to that of one of the files on the drive.

4. If you find such a process, select it, click the End Process button, and confirm your decision.

5. Try safely removing the drive again.

If Windows still won't let you remove the drive, it's time for desperate measures. Here are two of them:

1. You can shut down your PC, remove the device, and then reboot. It works, but it's time consuming and annoying.

2. Or you could take a deep breath, cross your fingers, and just pull the stupid thing out. I know, I'm not supposed to tell you that. It's bad advice. But I've done it more times than I'd care to admit, and it's never backfired on me. Which isn't to say I can guarantee that it won't backfire on you--I can't. And don't even think about doing this if your external drive is NTFS-formatted (see the tip on the next page for a discussion of that issue).

If those solutions don't prove helpful enough, there's another one you can try, but it will cost you 20 bucks.

Download and install USB Safely Remove. This $20 shareware program puts its own icon in the System Tray in place of Windows' remove icon. When it can't safely close a drive, it shows you what processes are causing the problem and gives you the opportunity to close them.

USB Safely Remove has other cool features, too. You can rename your USB devices, set up a hot-key to stop a particular device, and set autorun options. If you don't want one more autoloading program, you can turn off the "Run on Windows startup" option and launch USB Safely Remove only when you need it--that is, when Windows won't otherwise let you safely remove a drive.

--Peter Hess, Los Angeles, California

I was extremely skeptical when I first heard that reformatting a flash drive for NTFS would improve performance.

I was also extremely wrong.

After running some makeshift benchmarks, using both an older, slower flash drive and the fastest one I've got, I'm now a convert. In some tests, especially those involving copying a lot of little files to the flash drive, I saw improvements in the neighborhood of 70 percent. Things weren't that impressive with my other tests, but NTFS beat FAT in all of them, and usually by a significant margin.

But there's a downside: compatibility--that is, the lack of it. Any Windows 2000, XP, or Vista machine can read and write to an NTFS drive, but that's about it. Depending on the system's configuration, you might be able to use it on a Mac or a Linux machine, but how can you depend on the configuration of someone else's computer? And you can pretty much forget about Windows 98 and Windows Me. Meanwhile, just about every computer with a USB port can read a FAT or FAT32 drive.

Another problem: One reason for NTFS's faster speed is that it caches writes. But that's inherently dangerous for removable media. Unplugging a flash drive before you get the "safe to remove" message is more likely to cause a problem if that drive is formatted in NTFS.

If drive performance means more to you than cross-platform compatibility, here's how to make the change:

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click your flash drive and select Properties.

2. Click the Hardware tab and select your flash drive from the list of drives.

3. Click the Properties button.

4. In the resulting dialog box, click the Policies tab. Select Optimize for performance; click OK, and then OK again.

5. Right-click the flash drive again and select Format...

6. In the 'File system' drop-down menu, select NTFS, and then click Start.

--Bloto, from the PC World Answer Line Forum

There may be several reasons why Windows turns a blind eye to your external drive. First, you should figure out if the problem is with that particular drive or port. Try plugging the drive into another USB port--preferably one on the other side of the computer. Some ports (usually the front ones on desktops) can be more finicky than others. Next, try the drive in another PC, or another drive in the same PC. These tests will tell you if you have a bad drive (which you can replace), a reasonable workaround (use another port), or a real problem.

If it's a real problem, try uninstalling and reinstalling the driver for that drive. USB storage drivers are very easy to install because they're built into the drives, themselves. Here's what to do:

1. Connect the USB drive.

2. If you're using XP, select Start, Programs, right-click My Computer, and select Properties. Click the Hardware tab, then the Device Manager button. For Vista, just click Start, type device manager, and press Enter.

3. You'll find the drive listed under 'Disk drives.'

4. Right-click the drive and select Uninstall. Confirm by clicking OK.

5. Now unplug the USB drive, then plug it in again. The drivers will reinstall automatically.

Vista has its own USB problem that keeps it from recognizing drives under certain conditions--for instance, if your PC has been in sleep or hibernation mode. Microsoft released a patch last October: update number KB941600. Even if your PC is set to receive automatic updates, it may not have received that one.

You can read more about this patch at Microsoft's Knowledge Base. And you can download the 32-bit version at Microsoft's download site. Unfortunately, this is one of those updates that requires validation (don't we all), so it forces you to accept Windows Genuine Advantage if you haven't already installed that update.

If, when you try to install the update, it tells you that it "does not apply to your system," that means you already have the update installed on your system.

My thanks to the many people at PC World's Answer Line Forum for the answers they offered when bloto first posted this question.

Lincoln Spector