Windows 10 won't eject USB thumb drive

By Selwyn Polit, 25 August, 2021

I'm struggling with a peculiar little problem.  My old faithful windows 10 computer will never eject the USB thumb drive.  It doesn't ever show any errors.  Its quite puzzling.  I have several usb devices currently working including a 4TB usb hard drive, usb keyboard and mouse and a Fujitsu USB scanner.  When I plug in the usb thumb drive, Windows makes the familiar boing noise and I can view the contents of the drive, but when I click the bottom right icon to eject, all goes well but explorer still sees the drive.  I can manually remove the thumb drive from the usb port and Windows remains silent.

Looking in explorer, the device still appears and I am able to browse the I: (in this case) as if the thumb drive is still plugged in.  I wonder why Windows thinks the drive is still plugged in.  No errors appear in the error log.  If I look in computer management/Disk Management, that just hangs. It just reports: "Loading disk configuration information." 

Also if I look in Device Manager, under disk drives, there is a device there: OCZ ATV USB Device.  (That is the thumb drive in question.)

When I try to reboot, the system just hangs and requires a hard reset (or pulling out the power cord.)

Do folks think this is a hardware or software issue?

I tried uninstalling the device from device manager but it never seems to actually work - just a green progress bar back and forth across the screen forever.

Hardware:

MSI 970A-G46 Motherboard (Socket AM3+ with New BIOS (B2 Stepping ready) PCI Express Gen3 OC Genie 2, 2 SATA 3 Cables, AMD970+ SB950

AMD FX8320 3.5 Ghz 16MB cache 8-core Unlocked Black edition 125W Desktop Processor

I do notice this in my error log:

The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{C2F03A33-21F5-47FA-B4BB-156362A2F239}

Wondering if it's related.

 

Update: 12-29-19

It is healed.  I have no idea how it fixed itself but I just tried it and it works fine.  I kinda like these self-healing systems.  Strange because I also just updated my Dell Latitude E6530 laptop from 8GB to 16GB and it trashed out Windows 10.  Puzzling, I know.  It acted so badly borked, windows key followed by any typing - zilch (normally this does a search.) Windows update - nope, settings search, try typing something - zilch.  Was super weird.

I was able to get it back to life my doing a Windows system restore which luckily the system had magically made on 12-24-19.