Monkeyless

I use an IDE-to-USB adapter to connect loose hard drives to my desktop using USB. I think it’s one of the coolest things ever invented, which is a little bit sad when you think about it. But it’s very handy.

It works great, but I ran into one annoying problem. Often when I try to stop the hard drive so I can disconnect it (using the “Safely Remove Hardware” thing in the Windows XP system tray, which gives the option “Safely Remove USB Mass Storage Device”), Windows says that it can’t stop the drive because it’s in use, and I should try again later. Specifically, it says “The device ‘Generic volume’ cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later.”

Now, I’ve gotten that before when there were things accessing the drive (“things” is computerese for programs or threads or whatever might be trying to do stuff). That’s what the warning is supposed to mean. But I was having problems where I couldn’t find any program doing anything on that drive. I quit out of everything that was running, closed every window, closed everything running in the system tray, and I still couldn’t “eject” the drive.

After a lot of cursing and throwing things in the general direction of Microsoft, I eventually tracked it down to Tascam Gigastudio. Specifically, the copy protection service called Crypkey License. Crypkey License is set to run at startup as a system service (the actual executable is crypserv.exe), and always runs in the background whether or not Gigastudio is running.

And, for whatever reason, it holds files open on my USB hard drives even if I haven’t run Gigastudio since attaching that drive.

For me, the solution was to set Crypkey to manual startup, so it’s not always running. Now I can add and remove hard drives without any problems. If I need to run Gigastudio, I just start the Crypkey service before launching it (if I forget, it’ll just freeze and need to be killed. Not a big surprise for an app as crashy and wonky as Gigastudio). When I’m done with Gigastudio I just stop the service again.

This would be a good spot for a rant about intrusive copy protection. That annoying service certainly isn’t stopping anyone from running Gigastudio with an illegally generated registration code, so all it’s doing is annoying everyone who uses the program. But I think everyone’s heard that rant before, so I’ll leave it at that.

So anyway, there’s the short version. If you use Gigastudio, you might have the same problem with your USB devices. I won’t get into the long and painful process of figuring out what could possibly be holding files open on the drive when no applications were running. It’s really not a very exciting read.