Toshiba portable hdd

[MTbowels]

I've bought a Toshiba STOR.E Canvio 2.5 inch portable HDD earlier today. I've connected it up to my PC via the supplied cable and installed the necessary back-up software onto the computer.

I don't want to play around backing up files tonight, so I want to disconnect the drive. The manual states that I should click on the "safely remove hardware and eject media" icon on the RH side of my taskbar, select the drive and click eject on the drive icon.

It's not working as I'm continually getting a message that a Windows program is using the drive and it's telling me to try again later. It's continued to do this for over an hour now.

How can I remove the drive? The manual states that data could be lost or the drive "physically damaged" if I just remove the USB cable.

Thank you

[MTbowels]

Incidentally, the drive is not backing up anything right now as far as I can see as it is still showing it's full capacity of 931GB in My Computer

[rojash]

It's a common problem with XP, when Explorer has changed the active directory to be one that's on the external drive. There are fiddly ways around it, but the easiest is simply to shut down the computer.

[MTbowels]

Thanks rojash. I'm very grateful. I should have made clear that my OS was Windows 7.
I had to eventually shut down the computer last night as you suggested as I could see no alternative. It's rebooted fine a few minutes ago so no harm done.

Thanks again.