I don't fucking know why I can't eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don't know who's lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.

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[–] umbraroze@piefed.social 12 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Told ya, Process Explorer just told me nothing, except Dropbox maybe.

But it doesn't change the usage scenario. I don't care what programs are using the drive. I just need to tell them to fuck off, I need to unplug this drive at this moment.

[–] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Whelp, time to shut down the whole computer! (Or just yank it and hope you didn't do anything bad, lol)

[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Have you ever actually used Process Explorer before? I mean digging behind the scenes and find out what process threads are eating the CPU and keeping storage access open..

Process Explorer does way more than the default GUI throws at you...

[–] umbraroze@piefed.social 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I've used Process Explorer.

"What file handles are open that match ?"
"Well there's Dropbox now."
"Oh. Again?"
"Dropbox, I think."
"Again."
"Maybe nothing???"
"OK, let's try ejecting now." (It fails again.) "Are you sure no file handles are using this drive?"
"I'm positive."
"Well fuck this then." (Unplug USB)

Now. I said I've used Process Explorer. I didn't say I've used Process Explorer. I wish to be, one day, one of those frightening people who live and breath Process Explorer every day. There's still a long journey to get there, I know.

[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y2bNLCWHFNs

[–] ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

For the future: File Lockpick, from PowerToys. The only thing the Windows product managers haven’t ruined, and only because it’s on Microsoft’s GitHub and not built into the OS. Or in Winget, since this is Lemmy.

You can just right click the drive that won’t eject or the file that won’t cut and it’ll list everything that had a handle open, without digging through the SysInternals programs.

I wonder where my computing would be if I spent all this time scaling the Linux learning curve instead of the Windows one. Probably more friction at my work-issued Windows machine. Probably increasingly many hours saved on “fixing” every successive Windows install.

For me it ends up being SpaceSniffer a solid 20% of the time.