So I bought a nice quiet 200mb Segate drive and stuck it into an external USB drive. I’m using it to store my Virtual PC images (boosts performance) and other shared files. But whenever I want to turn it off, Windows XP really doesn’t want to let me stop it using the “Safely Remove Hardware” function, instead serving up a “The device ‘Generic volume’ cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later.”

After digging around a bit I found the solution on a post on Geekly Rambling — Norton Protected Recycle Bin (aka Unerase Wizard) kept holding onto the drive. Once I told Norton to stop protecting that drive, I was able to Stop it easily.

To configure Norton Protected Recycle Bin (if you installed Norton SystemWorks, you probably have it) to leave your USB drive alone:

• Connect your USB drive to your computer & power it up. Wait until Windows recognizes it.
• Right-click the Norton Protected Recycle Bin wastebasket on your desktop and click Properties.
• Go to the Norton Protection tab.
• Choose the drive letter of your USB drive from the dropdown, and uncheck the Enable Protection checkbox. Click OK.

That’s it! Now, you might be wondering why I bother to Stop the drive at all…why not just unplug it from the PC? Well, that’s because I configured the drive for higher performance using the “Optimize for Performance” setting in the Device Manager. The downside of that is you should use “Safely Remove Hardware” before unplugging it.