Acronis True Image 2021 locking WD My Passport Ultra portable drive
I have been using Acronis products for years now and had no issues until the other day when I opened Acronis 2020 and was greeted with a 2021 update available which I downloaded and installed thinking nothing of it and a few hours later I needed to access a file on my Western Digital My Passport Ultra 1GB portable hard disk. I plugged the disk in and went through the process of opening the disk which is password protected, the disk has a hidden partition called WD Unlocker which has a CD drive icon, anyway there was no problem there, I accessed the file and proceeded to eject the disk safely but kept getting popups telling me "The device cannot be stopped right now. Close all applications that have open files on the disk then try to stop the device again" I know that there are no open files or applications on the disk when I try to eject.
Prior to updating to 2021 version everything worked fine and to prove that is was 2021 version at fault I removed Acronis completely after that I could eject the WD Drive safely without any issues. I then reinstalled Acronis 2021 and yep the problem came back.
I hope someone can help me with this current issue as its a bit frustrating having to shut the computer down to remove the disk.
Regards
Hello Heich!
This issue is currently under investigation by Acronis RnD and my colleagues would be grateful for the opportunity to conduct a remote session on an affected system. If the issue reproduces on your PC and you're ready for the remote session with a developer, please let me know. Thank you!
Ekaterina, I have a selection of external USB drives, where any with a FAT32 boot partition can no longer be safely removed after ATI 2021 was installed, but any with just a single NTFS partition can be removed fine!
If I then use the option to create an Acronis Survival Kit on the same drive (H: 1TB HDD) the drive now has a 2GB FAT32 partition as well as the previous NTFS one and can no longer be safely removed.
The only way I have found of being able to safely remove the drive at this point is to set the drive to be Offline in Disk Management then it can be removed but has to be set Online again when next connected!
Quick further update:
Initially after creating the Survival Kit on my H: 1TB external USB drive I was still able to safely remove it but after performing a first backup to the drive, that was no longer possible and the 'drive in use' popup panel was given on all attempts, so had to set the drive offline to remove it!
Dear Steve,
thank you co much for sharing your detailed investigation! Your post helped my colleagues to localize the issue.
Cross reference to topic here
Post removed.
Thanks Steve for the information to clarify the matter
Drive locking issue looks to be resolved in ATI 2021 #32010 build released today!
My last update was obviously too soon! The issue is back again on #32010 and am getting the same messages when trying to safely eject my external USB 2TB HDD.
Looks like I am back to having to set the drive offline again as even using AutoRuns to deselect the Acronis NG Antimalware Driver (ngscan.sys) didn't make any difference today either though this seems to work yesterday!
Hello Everyone,
we've found a new issue TI-211384 "This device is currently in use" message appears when trying to eject USB-disk after creation of Acronis Survival Kit, however the fix is only planned for the next major version.
Thanks Ekaterina for the update - it is a pity that Acronis is focused on forcing the new Protection features on users that they cannot fix core issues with the main Backup & Recovery components of ATI. A lot of users may never buy the next major version of ATI, especially with the imposition of subscriptions and loss of perpetual licenses added to the bloat of protection.