I have received over a hundred such error messages over 20 years and have done the scan. Never once has the scan found a problem. It's like the offer to run a Windows analysis of a problem. The analysis NEVER finds the cause or fixes the problem.
@@JunglTemple This is true. I needed to use IE for a program which expects to see iexplore.exe but Microsoft disabled IE on Win10. They could've removed it, and allowed users to install it, but NO. They think enabling IE mode in edge is what we need.
This happened a lot to me back when I used to sync my classic iPods with iTunes. Most times I was in a hurry and never bothered to eject the iPod first because I had to run to catch the bus... guess it makes sense now. Excellent video for us "advanced beginners" casual users :D
Bro this happens all the time when using a drive on Windows after using the same drive on Linux. Run the CHDSK and low and behold no errors whatsoever found.
+1 to OP, it happens all the time when mounting on Windows just after unmounting from Linux kernel. Even after unmounting the filesystem *cleanly* I will say. Now we will have to find out with hex dump on the block device, at least we have an offset to watch for 😌
@@flamingjohn7595 It has great own file systems. Any more support brings up more support cases and of course security possibilities. Plus the ext file systems were optimized for how Linux works, not how Windows works (NTFS is opimized for Windows with its ACLs etc.).
Making the USB drive dirty all the time by the command would be a pretty harmless prank for my colleagues. I guess I know what I will do before 1st of April :)
When I switched to Linux, I kept getting corrupted files on my USB sticks. It took me over a year to realize that copying isn't done when the "cp" command returns or the progress window disappears. The difference between the filesystem and the storage medium, and the importance of syncing, are probably the most obscure things I've encountered.
@@henry_tsai and it would tell you it’s still writing to the drive. Windows has a disc cashing “feature” that basically just makes your drive look faster than it actually is by holding the remaining data in ram while it’s writing. But to the user it claims it’s done…
The issue I have is trying to eject the drive and windows says that the device is being accessed. If I have all programs closed there shouldn't be anything accessing it.
thank you for the explanation! its seems like such a simple thing, im baffled why it can't just tell you what happened instead of being as vague and unhelpful as possible. it's really frustrating how far into the weeds the average Windows user has to go to now just to figure out random little issues like this. i feel like it wasnt always this bad, but maybe im just dumb lol
Windows 3.1 Exception Error has occurred please reboot Win95: An Unrecoverable Error has occurred Windows is shutting down For both of these there was no further explanation or error code there are hundreds of errors like this.. of course BSD (Blue Screen of Death) for Win95..Win98 etc at least it has technical info.. before that when Win 3.0 and Win 3.1 and Win 3.11 crashed it would just be random garbage all over the screen usually with the speaker screeeching.. A Dirty Bit has been used as has far back as Win 95 (and Windows NT 3.5) to see if the system was shutdown properly..on starting of Windows the dirty bit would be checked and would be set.... if you went through the Shutdown then the bit would would be unset
This comment goes back at least 10 years, and probably more like 15 or 20. I told Windows to proceed with the scan and fix process. When it was done, the USB drive had no files listed in Explorer. There had been lots of files on that drive. From that point on, I never allowed Windows to scan AND fix with a single click. Once bitten, twice shy!
had the same happen..in my case it was a external spinning drive connected to USB port ...there was apparently something wrong with the MBR (Master Boot Record) so Windows solution was to zero out the MBR and wala a "blank drive" that needed to be "formatted" ..i yanked the drive quickly (to make sure no data would be written to it until i was ready) got a MBR repair util and ran it and it fixed it..there were tens of thousands of files on the drive..
... even though it was specifically told what the text should be. I once tried to get Microsoft Image Creator to show me three squirrels cavorting in the snow but it insisted on drawing at least eight. Hmmm - a computer which can't count up to three reliably.
8:08 If a background process is using it and task manager doesn’t show any obvious program, using File Explorer will ask to close any programs. (Most people probably know this but I didn’t for a while and thought it might help.❤
If you get this a lot AND its accompanied by the drive unplugging sound constantly AND you have a USB hub running multiple devices theres a good chance youre just trying to pull too much power from one bus.
After having a ton of my important files deleted without confirmation, I stopped clicking on the "Repair" option Windows provides and just ignore the error. And yes, before anyone asks, those files were working perfectly and the programs used to open those files never reported anything. The video is very informative but I do think this should have been mentioned. And if this has never happened to you, you my friend don't use USB drives that much. PS: I do safely remove my USB drives and make sure nothing is writing to it if it says the drive can't be safely removed. Why it keeps giving me that error on multiple drives is beyond me.
FAT based drives aren't very reliable so the dirty bit tells the OS it should run a scan the next time the drive is mounted. NTFS rarely goes "dirty" because the journal can be rolled back to put the drive back into a known good configuration.
Okay, but I often get a pop-up that tells me I still can't eject the USB drive safely. I assume something is still going on behind the scenes, but as someone who's not very tech-savvy, I'm sure everything I did is finished, and I've already closed all the programs that might be using the USB drive
Always use safe eject whether it's fixed or removable. No matter what Microsoft tries to tell you. You never know what's still using the drive, I've even seen Windows Defender preventing me from ejecting it in the past
I always got this error and was like, "Ugh, it's probably because my dumb ASUS computer has a faulty USB port", because before I had my gaming PC, I used ASUS and sometimes it would constantly say "something is wrong with your drive" and it would disconnect in the middle of transferring files. At least I know that it's basically saying that something might not have transferred all the data. Because it one time disconnected my USB while it was transferring a file.
And this is why you're always supposed to wait until it is fully dismounted, avoiding the drive from being removed mid-write. I've also run into this when only Reading a drive too.
Windows Vista has actually introduced many useful and secure behind-the-scenes features which is often overlooked by many which is sad. Also, you should make a video about the safely remove feature of windows that does not work on external HDDs, saying that's it in use even if not by user or applications. [DriveLetter]:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\ is detected by lockhunter is which is being used by system process with pid 4 and cannot be force stopped. I face this issue with my WD My Passport 1 TB from 2019
As a Tech gong back to the days of DOS 2.0, Microsoft have done a really shit job with the lack of detail for what error messages actually mean, in supporting end users. - End users should not have to research for such common issues and how to resolve them - The effort by Microsoft would have been negligible to provide the required detail in the description of the error. Can you imagine how many support calls have occurred from these sorts of common issues and the resulting economic cost and counter-productivity.
For something as simple as this, instead of saying the drive has a problem making guess work,rather than adding " potential writing status" on the end. even that would explain the whole thing. if it is 1 that is it, was not checked if it was safe to remove, nothing for anyone to worry about by adding a few extra words.
i go back as far as you do first use of MSDOS was 2.11.41...2 of my favorites one old one and a newer one with PNP .. "An Unknown Error has occurred please reboot"..no other info no stack info.. nothing...also an Exception Error has occurred Shutting down Windows ..... Found Unknown Device ..installing Unknown device..Unknown device successfully installed..
The dirty bit does NOT tell all. I had the opposite happen to my USB drives a few Windows versions back: No error message, but new files or updates were missing when I plugged it back in. When I asked the internet "WHY?" the answer I found was enabling Fast Startup can cause this. Might have something to do how Windows buffers to perform fast startup. Never proved that it was the cause of my problem, but after I disabled fast startup, I did not see the problem again. I continue to disable fast startup. One burned, forever shy.
The PS4 Pro did this all of the time with an external HDD I was using (PlayStation Certified too). You can have all games and such closed, turn it off via menu, then once you turn it in, it goes through this. It also always said it was solved.
In addition to Windows Vista introducing self-healing NTFS, Windows 8 expanded the types of errors it can fix. I seem to be noticing an irony here: Windows versions that were hated introduced a technology that improved reliability. Windows Me introduced System Restore
I usually eject the drive, but sometimes it just refuses to eject and tells me something is using it. That's when I pull the drive without ejecting. Sometimes I get the error and sometimes nothing happens because it was just Windows 11 being the most worthless pile of garbage to ever be an operating system.
What would also be interesting to point out is what happens when the Dirty Bit is set on the C: drive: thats how chkdsk works. When Windows starts up and detects the Dirty Bit directly on the C drive, it automatically initiates a chkdsk scan during boot.
Meh. I never eject and always just ignore the error. It's become just another Windows annoyance at this point. Honestly, I think Windows could just get rid of the whole eject thing, and prevent errors from even being an issue, by using an asynchronous Service to constantly scan the drive for errors and also keep it in an ejected state, where the system would "fake" mount the drive, so it's always visible in explorer while it's physically inserted, but behind the scenes it only ever gets mounted during a read/write operation, and is always ended with the drive being "ejected". Then, we only issue an error if a write was interrupted and the system was unable to clear the dirty bit. Then we also implement something like a "resume download" feature, that keeps track of where an interrupt happened, so that the user can re-insert the USB - at any time - to finish the write operation and clear the dirty bit. And finally, to put a cherry on top: add a simple icon to the taskbar, to indicate when a drive is unsafe to remove.
The whole point of having to click on eject is to not allow any program to write to it anymore, preventing any corruption in the first place. Continuously checking a drive for corruption can be very demanding, depending on what type of storage it is.
@@NorthLaker You're half right about eject. Except your confusing its intended purpose with its side effect. Its stated/intended purpose is to make the drive safe to eject, so that it can be removed from the system, which has that side effect of making it unwriteable, and only for the purpose of preventing corruption. But it isn't intended as a tool for users to prevent programs writing to the drive. As for our service continuously checking the drive for corruption: No, it doesn't have to be demanding, unless it's poorly written code. Perhaps I should have used "persistent" rather than "continuous" however, because our algorithm doesn't actually need to continuously scan anything;. See Windows internally raises events for literally everything, which are accessible by everything, including when a drive is being write/read to. And because a USB doesn't just randomly corrupt itself just sitting there, and because Windows already has systems built in to detect/fix data stream errors during read/write, our service only needs to kick in when the drive is being accessed and only keep track of where in a file the transfer is at (with a simple integer memory address pointer), and if that gets interrupted at any point, nothing else. Since an interruption is the only thing that will create the corruption we're trying to prevent, that's all we have to do, and it's overhead would be nearly undetectable in a unit test or benchmark. As for other kinds of corruption, that's not our concern, because that would the result of some other problem requiring different tools and fixes.
I used to see this every single time I used the pendrive I took to school/university, and sometime later I just gave up trying to fix it every time, thinking it was the drive itself. But then I noticed that if I fixed it in another machine it stopped happening until I used it on my home PC, then it started happening again. Idk if I had a virus or some other background program doing this to drives on my pc, but ever since I formatted and installed Win 10 (this was back on 7) I never saw it again. It is the main reason I always make sure to eject every single drive before disconnecting it nowadays.
If NTFS access times are enabled, then just reading a file will cause Windows to write to the drive to update the file's access time. If NTFS has a dirty bit too then just reading files could cause the message to show. But this feature is disabled by default so it's unlikely and few people will be using NTFS on removable drives so that makes it even more unlikely. I have seen this message in the past and assumed it was a read error on the drive.
There was a scam going around that attempted to set the dirty bit of the C drive to make the OS think the main drive has issues And they theyll probably do the classic call center-ish scam after i guess but idk
It’s kinda interesting macOS deals with this the other way around. When you unplug a drive without properly ejecting it, instead of telling you to repair the drive next time you plug it in, macOS would tell you immediately: ‘You idiot! Eject before you unplug it!’.
Can you set the C drive (or the drive that Windows is installed on) to be dirty on versions after and including Vista? Would it then prompt you to run chkdsk on startup?
I always get this error when my Ex-FAT drive is connected to Mac first and then disconnected and connected to a windows computer. (Also, when I reconnect to Mac, it doesn't even recognise the drive.) Very annoying. In fact I lost a drive thinking it got corrupted. Thank you for making this video.
if i'm corect in it's meaning that is exactly all it is, it detected a usb but it doesen't know what it is (potentially a bad power or usb hub, generally can't communicate to it).
I know that it happens for me, specifically when I modify the contents of a flash drive (or one of its partitions) under a Linux environment (like on my retro handheld) and then access it from Windows, I'm guessing that it has something to do with how Linux accesses the drive that Windows doesn't like. I usually just ignore it because I know there's nothing actually wrong with the drive or partition.
The only time I have ever seen this message is when I use a USB drive to copy files for 3D printing. I'll copy the files to be printed to a drive then use the correct procedure to remove the drive. If I re-connect the drive to my computer, I don't see any errors, so I know I'm removing the drive correctly. I then connect the USB drive to my Creality K1 Max, print the items, then shut down the printer and remove the USB drive. When I then re-connect the USB drive to my computer, Windows will show the error message. So I'm guessing the Creality K1 Max is writing something to the drive, but not clearing the dirty bit after the data has been written.
@@null-0x It happens rarely, but there are situations, like a sudden power loss on a PC wil trigger that behaviour, if at that moment some program saved something. :)
I try to eject a USB drive and it keeps telling me it is not safe because some program is still using it. I close all programs and it still gives the warning. All I can do is Restart or Shutdown. Why?
possibles: is Windows Explorer open and displaying contents of the drive? open Task Manager and kill tasks one at a time testing each time to see if you can eject the drive..this may give a clue of which task is holding the drive
I never do the drive check on my USB multiboot thumbdrives, it suggested to format the whole drive because it doesnt like linux bootloaders and other linux partitions on the drive
In my experience as as user (not a techie), this problem is chronic with SSD USB drives that have been factory formatted to ExFAT. A format I use on all my external drives, since I'm in a mixed Windows/MacOS environment. On those drives, it especially happens every time the drive wanders between Mac and PC. Lately I've realized that it tends to not crop up so much when I format a new drive to ExFAT myself before using it. Also, factory-formatted ExFAT drives frequently fail to mount on recent Macbooks. So my non-expert advice (that I wish I'd known sooner): Do a clean format on every new external drive before you start using it. What do you think?
I have a micro SD card I use for 3d prints that got the dirty bit set at some time. I never really bothered to do the scan because I always immediately use whatever file I put on there and nothing was ever wrong, I always eject it too.
The sd cards of my bicycle "dash"cams do this a lot. Of course a dash cam is never not writing, but you'd still think a regular power down would not do this, they'd find some way to quickly finish the latest mp4. And I've never seen a corrupt broken off file.
I got this error message message many times when switching an SD Card between Steam Deck and Windows. After a while, I noticed files disappearing, e.g., the content of the entire catalogue! Moreover, the size of all files on the card was less than what both systems reported in the card's properties - I was missing 60GB>. After a format, things have come back to normal.
I often get this error if I use my USB drive on my Android phone or Chromebook, even if I do use the eject drive feature. Next time I plug it into my Windows laptop, the error flags up. It doesn't concern me as I just run the scan and it gets fixed swiftly, but I thought it might be interesting enough to share here
kind of on and off topic. I have two 3.5 HDDs in an external dock. If I go to the "safely remove Hardware and External Media" option and select to remove them and then turn off the externally powered dock is that okay? Just asking because sometimes when i go to turn off the dock I can still feel the drives spinning even though they have been safely removed from Windows. I'm using a Sabrent Dual bay external dock.
finally i know how to get the dirty check/scan on boot away... yes i hat problems where this scan was doing EVERY BOOT i thinkk the scan has not unset the dirty bit... :/
I could be wrong, but doesn't this prompt also come up sometimes when the drive is in a format windows doesnt usually like? (eg. ext4). Its been a while since I've put one of those into my pc, but I could be confusing it with the "you must format this drive first before you can use it" prompt. I usually try to safe eject when I can. I've been finding in recent times, on Win 11 (could be fixed by now, depending when reading this), if you use the "search" from file explorer, but then just end the search improperly (eg, use the "x" next to your search term or press "back") it sometimes doesnt end operation and it prevents safe eject of the drive. I've noticed this on more than one occasion. First time I saw it, I saw an extra task instance (of explorer) running in task manager, and ending that task allowed me to safe eject.
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After 24 years of ignoring this error, finally someone explains it 😂
I always just did it and it said there were errors (once in the notification and once in the wizard) then it did a scan and nothing was wrong.
Naaaah, of course it was explained before many times, it is even documented by Microsoft. But you finally saw someone you follow explain it ;)...
Yea. Me just about to said that but u already 😂
can't argue😂
fr😂
it always make me panic that my data might get corrupt lol
At least your USB works 😅
I always get that when plugging in my external drive
same. It died recently. the MBR is currupted and didn't even get detected by windows
@@lucasandcalebchannel for some reason I read "it died" as "I died" and was about to make a joke on it 😂😂
cuz u have dirty stuff in there, dont u
same
i have an old external hdd and that message always shows up, luckily i don't use it anymore so i don't need to worry
I have received over a hundred such error messages over 20 years and have done the scan. Never once has the scan found a problem. It's like the offer to run a Windows analysis of a problem. The analysis NEVER finds the cause or fixes the problem.
That error is also shown when you plug in a drive with a filesystem that Windows doesn't natively recognize, like ext4.
This is likely because the hex byte its checking for is greater than 0 for that drive formatting
Isn't that a feature that asks you to format the drive? Don't do that, you will lose the data on the ext4 partition.
Unless if you create another partition in the drive's partition table as NTFS, FAT32, or exFAT
Microsoft hates compatibility
@@JunglTemple This is true.
I needed to use IE for a program which expects to see iexplore.exe but Microsoft disabled IE on Win10.
They could've removed it, and allowed users to install it, but NO.
They think enabling IE mode in edge is what we need.
Whenever I see the error I'm concerned for approximately 1 second then forget about it
This happened a lot to me back when I used to sync my classic iPods with iTunes. Most times I was in a hurry and never bothered to eject the iPod first because I had to run to catch the bus... guess it makes sense now.
Excellent video for us "advanced beginners" casual users :D
Yes, Joe, I was in fact wondering what this meant.
Bro this happens all the time when using a drive on Windows after using the same drive on Linux. Run the CHDSK and low and behold no errors whatsoever found.
Well, that is true, also MICROSOFT WHY NOT EXT FILE FORMAT SUPPORT?!
@@flamingjohn7595 I assumed that's the root of my issue. It's annoying af
To me it also happens between windows 7 and 10
+1 to OP, it happens all the time when mounting on Windows just after unmounting from Linux kernel. Even after unmounting the filesystem *cleanly* I will say. Now we will have to find out with hex dump on the block device, at least we have an offset to watch for 😌
@@flamingjohn7595 It has great own file systems. Any more support brings up more support cases and of course security possibilities. Plus the ext file systems were optimized for how Linux works, not how Windows works (NTFS is opimized for Windows with its ACLs etc.).
Excellent explanation
Bro didnt even watch the vid yet
first
Making the USB drive dirty all the time by the command would be a pretty harmless prank for my colleagues. I guess I know what I will do before 1st of April :)
Whenever you say dirty bit I have to think of the black eyed peas haha
Excellent research you did again, thank you for your work
When I switched to Linux, I kept getting corrupted files on my USB sticks. It took me over a year to realize that copying isn't done when the "cp" command returns or the progress window disappears. The difference between the filesystem and the storage medium, and the importance of syncing, are probably the most obscure things I've encountered.
ya honestly cashing files while writing and calling it done seems stupid and i turn it off in windows and linux
Just umount/eject it before unplugging it, it would write the cache to the drive, that's the whole point of ejecting.
@@henry_tsai and it would tell you it’s still writing to the drive. Windows has a disc cashing “feature” that basically just makes your drive look faster than it actually is by holding the remaining data in ram while it’s writing. But to the user it claims it’s done…
The issue I have is trying to eject the drive and windows says that the device is being accessed. If I have all programs closed there shouldn't be anything accessing it.
I always mock how it says errors were found, scans it then proceeds to tell me that no errors could be found on my USB.
thank you for the explanation! its seems like such a simple thing, im baffled why it can't just tell you what happened instead of being as vague and unhelpful as possible.
it's really frustrating how far into the weeds the average Windows user has to go to now just to figure out random little issues like this. i feel like it wasnt always this bad, but maybe im just dumb lol
Windows 3.1 Exception Error has occurred please reboot
Win95: An Unrecoverable Error has occurred Windows is shutting down
For both of these there was no further explanation or error code there are hundreds of errors like this..
of course BSD (Blue Screen of Death) for Win95..Win98 etc at least it has technical info..
before that when Win 3.0 and Win 3.1 and Win 3.11 crashed it would just be random garbage all over the screen usually with the speaker screeeching..
A Dirty Bit has been used as has far back as Win 95 (and Windows NT 3.5) to see if the system was shutdown properly..on starting of Windows the dirty bit would be checked and would be set.... if you went through the Shutdown then the bit would would be unset
This comment goes back at least 10 years, and probably more like 15 or 20. I told Windows to proceed with the scan and fix process. When it was done, the USB drive had no files listed in Explorer. There had been lots of files on that drive. From that point on, I never allowed Windows to scan AND fix with a single click. Once bitten, twice shy!
had the same happen..in my case it was a external spinning drive connected to USB port ...there was apparently something wrong with the MBR (Master Boot Record) so Windows solution was to zero out the MBR and wala a "blank drive" that needed to be "formatted" ..i yanked the drive quickly (to make sure no data would be written to it until i was ready) got a MBR repair util and ran it and it fixed it..there were tens of thousands of files on the drive..
Android boxes usually flag the USB drives as dirty if you don't unmount them first in the settings.
You just brought back the memories of a terrible Black Eyed Peas song
No such thing as a terrible Black Eyed Peas song.
I actually like it, I could see how people think it's worse than the original, but it's a great edm song to dance
1:41 Generative AI is getting scary good at text, tho it still struggles it says "YOU FORGOTEN TO EJECT THE DR0VE"
... even though it was specifically told what the text should be. I once tried to get Microsoft Image Creator to show me three squirrels cavorting in the snow but it insisted on drawing at least eight. Hmmm - a computer which can't count up to three reliably.
8:08 If a background process is using it and task manager doesn’t show any obvious program, using File Explorer will ask to close any programs. (Most people probably know this but I didn’t for a while and thought it might help.❤
Your Hexpat structure immediately took me back 40 years when I would fix Unix file systems using adb on the raw device.
Ha ha, me too. Back in ‘84, ‘85, using a hex editor called Tester and “disk map” printouts to rewrite CP/M disk sectors after corruption.
Refrigerant system leakage or fault
This often happens to my usb, this was a helpful explanation
If you get this a lot AND its accompanied by the drive unplugging sound constantly AND you have a USB hub running multiple devices theres a good chance youre just trying to pull too much power from one bus.
After having a ton of my important files deleted without confirmation, I stopped clicking on the "Repair" option Windows provides and just ignore the error. And yes, before anyone asks, those files were working perfectly and the programs used to open those files never reported anything. The video is very informative but I do think this should have been mentioned. And if this has never happened to you, you my friend don't use USB drives that much.
PS: I do safely remove my USB drives and make sure nothing is writing to it if it says the drive can't be safely removed. Why it keeps giving me that error on multiple drives is beyond me.
Anyone remember that bug from early 2021 that would mark drive C as dirty if you tried to access a specific directory from the command prompt?
Finally a video that's useful. Do more of these instead of like the last 5 which were useless.
Earliest I have ever been to a Thiojoe video!
FAT based drives aren't very reliable so the dirty bit tells the OS it should run a scan the next time the drive is mounted.
NTFS rarely goes "dirty" because the journal can be rolled back to put the drive back into a known good configuration.
aka LKG Last Known Good
When I manually set bit to 1 system had informed me (immediately in balloon info) of checking drive after reboot. Thank to know what it really is;)
Okay, but I often get a pop-up that tells me I still can't eject the USB drive safely. I assume something is still going on behind the scenes, but as someone who's not very tech-savvy, I'm sure everything I did is finished, and I've already closed all the programs that might be using the USB drive
Well now i know. Even tho i stopped using Windows and now using Debian (a Linux distribution), i still watch these videos! Thanks ThioJoe!
Always use safe eject whether it's fixed or removable. No matter what Microsoft tries to tell you. You never know what's still using the drive, I've even seen Windows Defender preventing me from ejecting it in the past
I always got this error and was like, "Ugh, it's probably because my dumb ASUS computer has a faulty USB port", because before I had my gaming PC, I used ASUS and sometimes it would constantly say "something is wrong with your drive" and it would disconnect in the middle of transferring files. At least I know that it's basically saying that something might not have transferred all the data. Because it one time disconnected my USB while it was transferring a file.
And this is why you're always supposed to wait until it is fully dismounted, avoiding the drive from being removed mid-write. I've also run into this when only Reading a drive too.
Windows Vista has actually introduced many useful and secure behind-the-scenes features which is often overlooked by many which is sad.
Also, you should make a video about the safely remove feature of windows that does not work on external HDDs, saying that's it in use even if not by user or applications. [DriveLetter]:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\ is detected by lockhunter is which is being used by system process with pid 4 and cannot be force stopped. I face this issue with my WD My Passport 1 TB from 2019
I always get this and got scared at first, but it happens all the time and the drive seems to work fine, this explains it very well hahaha
As a Tech gong back to the days of DOS 2.0, Microsoft have done a really shit job with the lack of detail for what error messages actually mean, in supporting end users.
- End users should not have to research for such common issues and how to resolve them
- The effort by Microsoft would have been negligible to provide the required detail in the description of the error.
Can you imagine how many support calls have occurred from these sorts of common issues and the resulting economic cost and counter-productivity.
For something as simple as this, instead of saying the drive has a problem making guess work,rather than adding " potential writing status" on the end. even that would explain the whole thing. if it is 1 that is it, was not checked if it was safe to remove, nothing for anyone to worry about by adding a few extra words.
i go back as far as you do first use of MSDOS was 2.11.41...2 of my favorites one old one and a newer one with PNP ..
"An Unknown Error has occurred please reboot"..no other info no stack info.. nothing...also an Exception Error has occurred Shutting down Windows .....
Found Unknown Device ..installing Unknown device..Unknown device successfully installed..
My brain is hardwired to belive any video made by this man is satire.
The dirty bit does NOT tell all. I had the opposite happen to my USB drives a few Windows versions back: No error message, but new files or updates were missing when I plugged it back in.
When I asked the internet "WHY?" the answer I found was enabling Fast Startup can cause this. Might have something to do how Windows buffers to perform fast startup. Never proved that it was the cause of my problem, but after I disabled fast startup, I did not see the problem again.
I continue to disable fast startup. One burned, forever shy.
Thanks for such a clear explanation. So easy to follow. 👍
Thanks for explaining this ❤ I also ignore this message always.
I had a user that had a folder they couldn’t access. So check disk ran to fix it but instead it disappeared. No found folders were there.
I usually get it with a Ventoy drive
Pretty sure this thing started popping up when I made a typo on a folder and didn't bother to fix it. Either way, truly a mystery.
2:04 POLAND MENTIONED 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱
@@axer552 POLSKA GÓROM!!!
lol i been wondering this forever but never looked it up
The PS4 Pro did this all of the time with an external HDD I was using (PlayStation Certified too). You can have all games and such closed, turn it off via menu, then once you turn it in, it goes through this. It also always said it was solved.
In addition to Windows Vista introducing self-healing NTFS, Windows 8 expanded the types of errors it can fix. I seem to be noticing an irony here: Windows versions that were hated introduced a technology that improved reliability. Windows Me introduced System Restore
I usually eject the drive, but sometimes it just refuses to eject and tells me something is using it. That's when I pull the drive without ejecting. Sometimes I get the error and sometimes nothing happens because it was just Windows 11 being the most worthless pile of garbage to ever be an operating system.
Nice info to know, I've had this happen to me, and had to do some research, to correct the USB Drive.
What would also be interesting to point out is what happens when the Dirty Bit is set on the C: drive: thats how chkdsk works. When Windows starts up and detects the Dirty Bit directly on the C drive, it automatically initiates a chkdsk scan during boot.
that usually means Windows was not shutdown properly..
Meh. I never eject and always just ignore the error. It's become just another Windows annoyance at this point.
Honestly, I think Windows could just get rid of the whole eject thing, and prevent errors from even being an issue, by using an asynchronous Service to constantly scan the drive for errors and also keep it in an ejected state, where the system would "fake" mount the drive, so it's always visible in explorer while it's physically inserted, but behind the scenes it only ever gets mounted during a read/write operation, and is always ended with the drive being "ejected". Then, we only issue an error if a write was interrupted and the system was unable to clear the dirty bit. Then we also implement something like a "resume download" feature, that keeps track of where an interrupt happened, so that the user can re-insert the USB - at any time - to finish the write operation and clear the dirty bit. And finally, to put a cherry on top: add a simple icon to the taskbar, to indicate when a drive is unsafe to remove.
The whole point of having to click on eject is to not allow any program to write to it anymore, preventing any corruption in the first place. Continuously checking a drive for corruption can be very demanding, depending on what type of storage it is.
@@NorthLaker You're half right about eject. Except your confusing its intended purpose with its side effect. Its stated/intended purpose is to make the drive safe to eject, so that it can be removed from the system, which has that side effect of making it unwriteable, and only for the purpose of preventing corruption. But it isn't intended as a tool for users to prevent programs writing to the drive.
As for our service continuously checking the drive for corruption: No, it doesn't have to be demanding, unless it's poorly written code.
Perhaps I should have used "persistent" rather than "continuous" however, because our algorithm doesn't actually need to continuously scan anything;.
See Windows internally raises events for literally everything, which are accessible by everything, including when a drive is being write/read to. And because a USB doesn't just randomly corrupt itself just sitting there, and because Windows already has systems built in to detect/fix data stream errors during read/write, our service only needs to kick in when the drive is being accessed and only keep track of where in a file the transfer is at (with a simple integer memory address pointer), and if that gets interrupted at any point, nothing else. Since an interruption is the only thing that will create the corruption we're trying to prevent, that's all we have to do, and it's overhead would be nearly undetectable in a unit test or benchmark.
As for other kinds of corruption, that's not our concern, because that would the result of some other problem requiring different tools and fixes.
the problem is windows
Who else has "red drive, blue drive, etc..."
I certainly do, haha
i had some problems with windows doing something to a a usb drive & i could never safely remove it
I used to see this every single time I used the pendrive I took to school/university, and sometime later I just gave up trying to fix it every time, thinking it was the drive itself. But then I noticed that if I fixed it in another machine it stopped happening until I used it on my home PC, then it started happening again. Idk if I had a virus or some other background program doing this to drives on my pc, but ever since I formatted and installed Win 10 (this was back on 7) I never saw it again.
It is the main reason I always make sure to eject every single drive before disconnecting it nowadays.
If NTFS access times are enabled, then just reading a file will cause Windows to write to the drive to update the file's access time. If NTFS has a dirty bit too then just reading files could cause the message to show. But this feature is disabled by default so it's unlikely and few people will be using NTFS on removable drives so that makes it even more unlikely. I have seen this message in the past and assumed it was a read error on the drive.
Thanks man. Every single time i plug something in it shows that
There was a scam going around that attempted to set the dirty bit of the C drive to make the OS think the main drive has issues
And they theyll probably do the classic call center-ish scam after i guess but idk
Yep, I've had this happen thousands of times.
It’s kinda interesting macOS deals with this the other way around. When you unplug a drive without properly ejecting it, instead of telling you to repair the drive next time you plug it in, macOS would tell you immediately: ‘You idiot! Eject before you unplug it!’.
Thank God I have this question from 5 years up to now 😂
Got this error message from Windows once from plugging a micro SD card. A quick format using the official SD formatter tool solved that problem.
you solved my question that tortured me for 10 whole years😂
I've been formatting all of my USB flash drives with NTFS because it is easier to fix. Properly ejecting the flash drive helps too.
Can you set the C drive (or the drive that Windows is installed on) to be dirty on versions after and including Vista? Would it then prompt you to run chkdsk on startup?
It could also happen whent he file transfer is finsihed and you immediately unplugged the drive as i experienced it myself 4:13
I always get this error when my Ex-FAT drive is connected to Mac first and then disconnected and connected to a windows computer. (Also, when I reconnect to Mac, it doesn't even recognise the drive.) Very annoying. In fact I lost a drive thinking it got corrupted.
Thank you for making this video.
What about “The last usb malfunctioned and Windows doesn’t recognize it”
if i'm corect in it's meaning that is exactly all it is, it detected a usb but it doesen't know what it is (potentially a bad power or usb hub, generally can't communicate to it).
I finally know now
I know that it happens for me, specifically when I modify the contents of a flash drive (or one of its partitions) under a Linux environment (like on my retro handheld) and then access it from Windows, I'm guessing that it has something to do with how Linux accesses the drive that Windows doesn't like. I usually just ignore it because I know there's nothing actually wrong with the drive or partition.
I tested this by copying files to my USB and while it was in process, I unplugged it and I did actually get the error
0:49 missed oportunity to put a sound effect of DIRTY BEAT from black eyed peas
I just saw this notification 11/16/2024 11:41
🤣🤣🤣Good one
The only time I have ever seen this message is when I use a USB drive to copy files for 3D printing. I'll copy the files to be printed to a drive then use the correct procedure to remove the drive. If I re-connect the drive to my computer, I don't see any errors, so I know I'm removing the drive correctly. I then connect the USB drive to my Creality K1 Max, print the items, then shut down the printer and remove the USB drive. When I then re-connect the USB drive to my computer, Windows will show the error message. So I'm guessing the Creality K1 Max is writing something to the drive, but not clearing the dirty bit after the data has been written.
Journaling File Systems are great as they can fix errors if you did an unclean shutdown of the drive.
That means "The hell you did to this drive before you plugged in"
1:04 I checked this with default C: and D: drives, and I got an error (specifically, `Error: Access is denied.`)
9:46 There is no video 💀
You need admin access for that to work on NTFS drives.
@Lofote Oh! Didn't know that, Thanks. Also, I doubt the dirty bit would ever be set to True, as those volumes are non-ejectable.
@@null-0x It happens rarely, but there are situations, like a sudden power loss on a PC wil trigger that behaviour, if at that moment some program saved something. :)
I see this error on some of my USB drives, I never run the check and just open them anyway - can be annoying sometimes though :)
I try to eject a USB drive and it keeps telling me it is not safe because some program is still using it. I close all programs and it still gives the warning. All I can do is Restart or Shutdown. Why?
possibles: is Windows Explorer open and displaying contents of the drive?
open Task Manager and kill tasks one at a time testing each time to see if you can eject the drive..this may give a clue of which task is holding the drive
I hated that notification. Now I understand it! Still hate it tho.
Terms “dirty bit” and “self-healing NTFS” really feel like we’re back in the days of the fake tutorials
The least they could do is fix the message to say something like "there might be a problem" rather than "there is a problem".
I never do the drive check on my USB multiboot thumbdrives, it suggested to format the whole drive because it doesnt like linux bootloaders and other linux partitions on the drive
neat that error was driving me nuts. i thought it was the manufacturer software for a back up drive.
In my experience as as user (not a techie), this problem is chronic with SSD USB drives that have been factory formatted to ExFAT. A format I use on all my external drives, since I'm in a mixed Windows/MacOS environment. On those drives, it especially happens every time the drive wanders between Mac and PC. Lately I've realized that it tends to not crop up so much when I format a new drive to ExFAT myself before using it. Also, factory-formatted ExFAT drives frequently fail to mount on recent Macbooks. So my non-expert advice (that I wish I'd known sooner): Do a clean format on every new external drive before you start using it. What do you think?
@@goestas the dame happens with a drive that has been connected to an android device, such an android TV
I have a micro SD card I use for 3d prints that got the dirty bit set at some time. I never really bothered to do the scan because I always immediately use whatever file I put on there and nothing was ever wrong, I always eject it too.
The sd cards of my bicycle "dash"cams do this a lot. Of course a dash cam is never not writing, but you'd still think a regular power down would not do this, they'd find some way to quickly finish the latest mp4. And I've never seen a corrupt broken off file.
Likely the bit gets set to 1 when the device powers on, but they didn't think about setting it to 0 when it turns off.
I got this error message message many times when switching an SD Card between Steam Deck and Windows.
After a while, I noticed files disappearing, e.g., the content of the entire catalogue! Moreover, the size of all files on the card was less than what both systems reported in the card's properties - I was missing 60GB>.
After a format, things have come back to normal.
This is very similar to disconnecting external drives without "unmounting" them on Unix-like operating systems like Linux
I had it on my usb and fixed it now
I often get this error if I use my USB drive on my Android phone or Chromebook, even if I do use the eject drive feature. Next time I plug it into my Windows laptop, the error flags up. It doesn't concern me as I just run the scan and it gets fixed swiftly, but I thought it might be interesting enough to share here
kind of on and off topic. I have two 3.5 HDDs in an external dock. If I go to the "safely remove Hardware and External Media" option and select to remove them and then turn off the externally powered dock is that okay? Just asking because sometimes when i go to turn off the dock I can still feel the drives spinning even though they have been safely removed from Windows. I'm using a Sabrent Dual bay external dock.
you have a 0.5 HDD How? did you cut it please tell me 😮😂
I don't recall ever seeing this specific error, and I never shut a USB drive down before disconnecting it.
this might also happen if the drive usage a filesystem windows does not know about. Like Btrfs or Ext4 for example
That happened to us a lot, even on win 10 users! 0:00
finally i know how to get the dirty check/scan on boot away...
yes i hat problems where this scan was doing EVERY BOOT
i thinkk the scan has not unset the dirty bit...
:/
I could be wrong, but doesn't this prompt also come up sometimes when the drive is in a format windows doesnt usually like? (eg. ext4). Its been a while since I've put one of those into my pc, but I could be confusing it with the "you must format this drive first before you can use it" prompt.
I usually try to safe eject when I can. I've been finding in recent times, on Win 11 (could be fixed by now, depending when reading this), if you use the "search" from file explorer, but then just end the search improperly (eg, use the "x" next to your search term or press "back") it sometimes doesnt end operation and it prevents safe eject of the drive. I've noticed this on more than one occasion. First time I saw it, I saw an extra task instance (of explorer) running in task manager, and ending that task allowed me to safe eject.