Hi,
Yesterday I ran into the subject of this topic myself …
The main part of this very unpleasant gag is that only after 2 hours and ~40 reboots I found this was the issue. And I will admit : the fact that this topic exists in this forum, helped me greatly with deciding in a split-second that indeed this was the issue. Otherwise it could have cost be 2 hours more to "prove" things.
So what's up ?
Some adapter-brick broke down and a USB hub I used went out of order. I bought a new one, and together with that a docking station for two HDDs (they are the most common these days). I decided to kind of explicitly combine things, and bought a docking station with 3 USB3 ports. So it was/is also presented as a USB hub. I needed exactly these 3 ports, so I gave that a go. No problem, works nicely.
Meanwhile I used that device to fill two HDD's with data in parallel. Mind you, this could not be exactly what they are made for (the two slots are merely there for physically copy (clone) from the one to the other, but alas, that worked too.
Until I though to eject one of those HDDs ... then it appeared that only the both together could be ejected. All right. Something to take into account in the future.
I even remember telling about it over here (a next person could make a mistake) and that "only the complete device" (with two HDDs in it) could be ejected".
Feel it coming ?
First off, this is illegal-ish of course. One shouldn't be ejecting two HDDs at the same time when one might need to eject only one. Yes, it was cheap.
But secondly came yesterday, and by no means I was able to let the "Play" button work in XXHighEnd. All just hung. I also noticed that at quitting XXHighEnd a. it would not quit at all (it remained visible in TaskManager) and b. it couldn't be thrown out with TaskManager. And, because I am also working on the software, I obviously thought I had done something wrong in the hours prior to this happening.
And now it became nasty, because I could not put up a new software version with the old one still running. So that implied the ~40 reboots ...
Then I noticed that the Mach III PC which this was about, would not allow to show me the contents of readily available networked drives; with Explorer it just hung ...
Quickly I noticed that this was exactly about those 3 USB disks I connected via the new "hub", and the combination of the knowledge of this topic, plus my remembrance of throwing out the whole device hence ... hub ... quickly solved it all, finally (use the new 7 ports official hub I bought as well).
Moral :
Even recognizing this as an issue is a tough job;
Because all really hangs, you can't go anywhere;
I now know how hard I tried to use logging to see what happened - it is impossible ("something" deep down hangs and it even remains as a part / process in the system, while XXHighEnd really officially closed - it now comes down to an OS bug (I think I promised that in this topic already)).
I proved to myself that really nothing can be done against this.
About the latter : well, call it an OS bug, but it really is caused by first something else which plainly is not compliant. Hard to fight against that, I'd say. So what will happen in this case is that I eject a HDD, instead the whole device is ejected (you see that all right but you can't see you eject the USB hub) and next the hub is shut down without notification to the OS, decently. In this case it caused the PC behind the LAN (the Mach III in my case) not to be notified that the 3 disks were not there any more (the music Server PC where they were connected to showed it all right). This was even nicely in Normal OS Mode, so all showed "green". But nothing was there any more for real. You can try forever if this is not understood, and the lot will hang forever. Something is just very wrong.
In the end that was Henk's problem too. Something wrong. "Just" take out the cause the soonest ...
Peter