Windows Defender stopping me from ejecting harddrive

I will try again but it would not add anything last time no matter what I tried.

@BWX, 

It will add the Folder if you follow the the instructions, it is quite simple.  

I did it on every machine I have. 

My machines have Windows 10 Pro (Builds 19042.630 and 20262.1010).

The procedure has not changed with different windows versions.

I assume you are the Administrator user for the machine...

After uninstalling Norton (as it came preinstalled after on my computer) I started to experience an issue, whenever I would try to eject my hard drive I would get an error, after looking in event viewer I saw an error talking about how msmpeng.exe was stopping it from ejecting. After researching I found out that this task was windows defender.

However I have tried everything to stop this from happening to no avail, Ive gone into its settings to turn it off and yet it still runs in the background still blocking be from ejecting my hard drive, attempting to close msmpeng.exe in task manager gives me an error that I dont have permission (with no way to change this) I have then followed guides about going into edit to make a file called disablelivespywareprotection (something like that) and now Im out of answers, Am I now forced to just unplug it unsafely or something? please help

 Hi harrison! 

     I haven't found any official solution but here is a simple trick:

          Go to Disk Management/Create or Format Partitions, in the lower part of the disk management window, find your disk, right click on it and click on 'offline' which will kill all the processes that the disk is running. After that, make it online again and then eject it as you would any other usb device.

After uninstalling Norton (as it came preinstalled after on my computer) I started to experience an issue, whenever I would try to eject my hard drive I would get an error, after looking in event viewer I saw an error talking about how msmpeng.exe was stopping it from ejecting. After researching I found out that this task was windows defender.

However I have tried everything to stop this from happening to no avail, Ive gone into its settings to turn it off and yet it still runs in the background still blocking be from ejecting my hard drive, attempting to close msmpeng.exe in task manager gives me an error that I dont have permission (with no way to change this) I have then followed guides about going into edit to make a file called disablelivespywareprotection (something like that) and now Im out of answers, Am I now forced to just unplug it unsafely or something? please help

 Hi harrison! 

     I haven't found any official solution but here is a simple trick:

          Go to Disk Management/Create or Format Partitions, in the lower part of the disk management window, find your disk, right click on it and click on 'offline' which will kill all the processes that the disk is running. After that, make it online again and then eject it as you would any other usb device.

@EsaAnjum, 

MS never came out with a fix for this bug.

But if you know the letter or letters usually assigned to the external drive(s) you can just exclude it from defender as shown here and then reboot, it excludes the root folder of the drive, and the eject works fine:

Do this:

• Win+X
• Windows Power Shell (Admin)
• type without quote: "Set-MpPreference -DisableRemovableDriveScanning 1"
• Restart.

IT NEVER BOTHERS ME, EVER AGAIN!

this problem occurs both on my laptop and PC (Windows 10 20H2),

I frustated with Windows Defender / Security for this problem, on my laptop even I tried to install Anti Virus (Kaspersky 30 day trial), to get rid Windows Defender so it will be inactive, but of course I don't want to pay for additional Anti Virus to all my devices just to stop this problem. That simple line to disable removable drive scans works like a charm.

Source: another thread here.

Do this:

• Win+X
• Windows Power Shell (Admin)
• type without quote: "Set-MpPreference -DisableRemovableDriveScanning 1"
• Restart.

IT NEVER BOTHERS ME, EVER AGAIN!

this problem occurs both on my laptop and PC (Windows 10 20H2),

I frustated with Windows Defender / Security for this problem, on my laptop even I tried to install Anti Virus (Kaspersky 30 day trial), to get rid Windows Defender so it will be inactive, but of course I don't want to pay for additional Anti Virus to all my devices just to stop this problem. That simple line to disable removable drive scans works like a charm.

Source: another thread here.

@MarhensaAditya Hadi, 

That doesn't really help, because it is already set to 1 (True) and it was not enough to avoid the problem.

See the output of the Get-MpPreference from the PowerShell command below.

I still had to add the root folder of the external drives in the exclusion path list in the defender settings to eliminate the problem, see second snap shot below and also see how it shows in the MpPreference list exclusion path: