process-explorer
I have an external disk (MyBook) that I always plug in and out of my PC. The problem now is that when I want to stop the MyBook USB device, I get a "cannot be stopped right now" error.
Is there any way, to use the Process Explorer to check what is holding my external disk, and thus preventing me from stopping it?
at 16:44 /Interactive taskmgr.exe
This would add a job to the scheduler to run the taskmgr.exe at 16:44. Select your time about 1 minute in the future from current time. The taskmgr.exe would run with the System account which has additional privileges. See if it works.
Process Monitor can do that for you.
You'll first might want to enable collection of profiling events:
Then, simply collect data for as long as you want (you may want to set up filters and enable Drop filtered events if you plan to collect for extended periods of time). Then go to Tools -> Process Activity Summary:
You'll now get a list of all active processes you recorded, with their activity over time.
You can then open the details for a single process (by double-clicking on it) and inspect the timestamps for certain events in the graph:
Best Answer
Hit menu Find -> Handle or DLL... and then put in the drive letter for your external drive, for example,
F:\. This should show you a list of all of the processes holding handles (links to files) on that drive.From @nwboson: Be sure to run procexp.exe as an administrator to ensure you are searching all processes. That is, don't just click on Process Explorer to run it, but instead right click it and do a 'Run as Administrator'.