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Sunburn74
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How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please assist!

Sat Jun 18, 2011 6:33 pm

I have a peculiar problem with Win7 and my seagate 1.5TB barracuda hard drive. My current setup is a SSD as my boot drive and the barracuda as a pure storage drive (no program or win7 tie ins). Previously I was able to go to hard drive properties and disable the seagate drive without a reboot needed. The drive would unmount and be disabled.

However, for reasons I can't quite figure out, win7 now requires a reboot to disable the storage drive now.

Can anyone tell me what I can do go back to where the storage drive will not need a reboot inorder to be disabled?
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akash3656
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please...

Sat Jun 18, 2011 8:44 pm

What you can do is get unlocker.
Then right click your Seagate drive in Explorer -> Unlocker...
You will basically see what is "locking/preventing" the drive from being disabled.
Another option would be go to disk management -> right click the drive that you want to disable -> Offline.
 
jara1990
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Sun Oct 21, 2012 5:36 pm

However, for reasons I can't quite figure out, win7 now requires a reboot to disable the storage drive now.


Had the same problem, you have to quit EVERY program that uses that drive, even music player(in my case;), mounted images of CD/DVDs etc. Then it should work..
 
WaltC
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Sun Oct 21, 2012 7:38 pm

Sunburn74 wrote:
I have a peculiar problem with Win7 and my seagate 1.5TB barracuda hard drive. My current setup is a SSD as my boot drive and the barracuda as a pure storage drive (no program or win7 tie ins). Previously I was able to go to hard drive properties and disable the seagate drive without a reboot needed. The drive would unmount and be disabled.

However, for reasons I can't quite figure out, win7 now requires a reboot to disable the storage drive now.

Can anyone tell me what I can do go back to where the storage drive will not need a reboot inorder to be disabled?


If you ever at any point could boot into Win7 and see your 1.5TB partition/drive *at all* then it was never at any time free of "program or win7 tie ins"...;) Follow me? Perhaps that was the case as you wanted it to be in your mind, but if Win7 can see a partition then it's a Win7 partition--or if Win7 can see the drive then it's a Win7 drive, so to speak. If the drive is as of yet unformatted, then Win7 will still put up a drive icon for it--and if you try and access it via the icon you will be asked by Win7 if you'd like to format it.

Is it possible for you to put the Seagate on a separate hard-drive controller, so that in the Device manager you would not disable the partition but you would disable the controller? (you should never, ever have one partition as big as 1.5tb in the first place, but that's beside the point here) That should work.

Disabling a separate controller should do exactly as you asked *except*, as people have already pointed out, unless you have some kind of software running on the drive when you boot into Win7. If that's the case, then you will not be allowed to turn off the drive, separate controller or no, until you have turned off the software running on or pointing to that drive. Do you have some kind of backup software running on your Windows 7 boot partition that is pointing to your Seagate? If so, that would probably be enough to disable your ability to turn off that drive before you turn off your backup software.

One last thing--if you have nothing running on another partition that points at anything on your Seagate partition, or any partition on that Seagate disk, then just format the Seagate partition/drive and see if it returns to its former condition of allowing you to shut the partition down at will from the DM. Good luck.

You might, however, like to mention why you want to do this in the first place...;)
 
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Sun Oct 21, 2012 7:47 pm

WaltC wrote:
(you should never, ever have one partition as big as 1.5tb in the first place, but that's beside the point here)

Why not? Modern filesystems like NTFS and EXT3/4 handle large partitions just fine. This sounds like FAT32-era advice to me.

Edit:
@Sunburn74 - My advice would be to download a copy of Process Explorer, to figure out what processes have files open on the drive. This should help you track down the culprit.
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Ryu Connor
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Sun Oct 21, 2012 8:06 pm

No need for process explorer. Just open up the Resource Monitor and select the disk tab.
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Sun Oct 21, 2012 8:15 pm

Ryu Connor wrote:
No need for process explorer. Just open up the Resource Monitor and select the disk tab.

Heh... I guess my outdated XP-era Windows skills are showing. :oops: Switched to Linux when Vista was released, and since then I've only dabbled with Win7 occasionally (in a VM).
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Mon Oct 22, 2012 11:19 am

Sunburn74 wrote:
I was able to go to hard drive properties and disable the seagate drive without a reboot needed. The drive would unmount and be disabled.

However, for reasons I can't quite figure out, win7 now requires a reboot to disable the storage drive now.

Yes, Unlocker or Resource Monitor should show you. Remember though, sometimes Windows Explorer (shell) may open handles against it without you knowing. So it can be tricky.

I am curious though, you are in the business of hiding your storage stash?
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insulin_junkie72
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Mon Oct 22, 2012 4:08 pm

Holy necro!

(check the date of the OP)
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PenGun
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Mon Oct 22, 2012 5:10 pm

Just pull the plug. Even windose will catch on eventually.
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Airmantharp
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Mon Oct 22, 2012 6:22 pm

PenGun wrote:
Just pull the plug. Even windose will catch on eventually.


And BSOD. Seriously, I made this mistake recently- picked up a 5.25" drive bay thing that hooks directly into SATA, which works great, but I had to mess with stuff in the BIOS and the OS to get it to work like an external drive. Without the changes, yeah- BSOD.
 
ludi
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Tue Oct 23, 2012 10:28 am

Airmantharp wrote:
PenGun wrote:
Just pull the plug. Even windose will catch on eventually.


And BSOD. Seriously, I made this mistake recently- picked up a 5.25" drive bay thing that hooks directly into SATA, which works great, but I had to mess with stuff in the BIOS and the OS to get it to work like an external drive. Without the changes, yeah- BSOD.

Yeah, generally you have to set the device as "removable" which then disables write caching, otherwise you can end up with a hung OS and a corrupt drive.

I sort of assumed PenGun was being sarcastic, but taken literally, it's bad advice.
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derFunkenstein
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Re: How to disable drives in win7 without reboot. Please ass

Tue Oct 23, 2012 11:03 am

If the BIOS has hot swap enable/disable support per drive will that make a difference? That would let you eject it rather than disable it. My ASUS board lets me turn on or off hot swap per SATA port. Then "pulling the plug", so to speak, shouldn't cause such a big deal.

I have a CM 690 II Advance case with an external dock. If I want to remove the drive, I just eject and Windows 7 doesn't want to reboot.
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