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I have an eSATA docking station like the one in this picture:

                                                  enter image description here

Every now and then, when I try to eject my drive, Windows complains with the following message:

                  enter image description here

Things I tried:

  1. I followed the instructions in this thread: Can Windows tell me what is using my USB drive? and I have Sysinternals Process Explorer installed, but when I search for the drive letter (F:\ in my case) nothing pops up.

  2. Following Oliver Salzburg's suggestion I run mountvol on cmd and got the unique drive identifier that widnows reports is associated with F:\. I then searched for any handles referring to this identifier in Sysinternals Process Explorer but again nothing popped up.

  3. Following Alan's suggestion I tried Sysinternals handle, ahd this is what I got:

Handle v3.46 Copyright (C) 1997-2011 Mark Russinovich Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

svchost.exe pid: 1020 type: File 594: F:

svchost.exe pid: 1020 type: File 5C4: F:\$Extend\$ObjId

svchost.exe pid: 1020 type: File 604: F:\System Volume Information\tracking.log

I can see that svchost is blocking my process, which technically answers my question. Now, would anybody mind helping me figure out how, knowing this, I can unblock the device?

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Maybe it's not being accessed through the drive letter, but through the unique device identifier. Use mountvol to determine it. –  Oliver Salzburg Feb 29 '12 at 14:22
eSATA is not USB also. –  EBGreen Feb 29 '12 at 15:32
Try Handle -c 1020 –  EBGreen Feb 29 '12 at 16:21
Using Process Explorer you can easily determine what services are run by that service host by simply hovering with your mouse over the process with that PID (1020). –  Oliver Salzburg Feb 29 '12 at 16:30

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Try the command line Handle utility, also from SysInternals.

At the prompt, issue:

handle f:
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Make sure to use "Run as administrator" when running Process Explorer. This will allow it to show additional things (like System and svchost.exe) that have open handles to the drive.

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