Can't remove external HDD from media library

[aplovisia]

When I have an external USB 3.0 HDD connected, it shows up in my Pictures/Video/Music libraries. I want to remove it from these media libraries but it doesn't show up in the list of folders when I go to "remove folders from the library".

Is there a registry hack or other way you know of to get rid of it? (other than disconnecting the drive)

I never added the HDD to any of these media libraries and it is causing Media Center to slow to a crawl while it tries to find media files on the HDD.

[Polen]

Have you tried modifying the Libraries of the desktop? I believe they are connected to WMC.

[aplovisia]

Have you tried modifying the Libraries of the desktop? I believe they are connected to WMC.

Thanks for the reply. I don't see the external HD in any of the desktop libraries.

[crawfish]

I wrote a message about this over a year ago but never got around to posting it, as I couldn't find any prior discussion on this issue on Google, which usually means no one will know the answer, and I forgot about it. The tl;dr version is, "Don't mount external drives while WMC is running," which I've mainly been able to practice. Here's the message with a more detailed description of what's happening and what's necessary for it to happen.

When I plug in external drives while WMC is open, ehshell.exe grovels the entire drives, as I determined using Sysinternals Process Monitor. This takes upwards of a minute or two for the 200,000 files that are in my main backup, and it really ticks me off as it's completely pointless. It happens with several hard drives in my USB3 dock, USB2 enclosures, and thumb drives. None have ever even had nightmares of being in a Windows "Library".

WMC does not grovel the drives if they are already mounted when I start WMC. The groveling happens only when they're mounted while WMC is already running, and I can do it over and over again. It happens every time I plug a drive in. It does not happen when I dust the cobwebs off WMP and run it, so the brain damage is peculiar to WMC as best I can tell. My only WMC addin is the GuideTool one. This is Windows 7 x64, BTW.

The necessary condition appears to be having folders specified for Recorded TV. My gaming system is also 7x64, and until just now, I haven't done anything with WMC on it. I plugged a thumb drive into it with WMC open, and nothing happened in Process Monitor. Then I added a folder to Recorded TV, and the next time I plugged the thumb drive in, WMC enumerated every file on the thumb drive. Now it's exactly like my main PC.

Unlike many of the other Microsoft programs and services that love to hurt performance and increase noise level by doing this sort of thing at various times, I don't see how to disable it for WMC. Does anyone know how to stop this stupid behavior, or is it perhaps a known quirk I haven't found described anywhere?

[CyberSimian]

When I have an external USB 3.0 HDD connected, it shows up in my Pictures/Video/Music libraries. I want to remove it from these media libraries but it doesn't show up in the list of folders when I go to "remove folders from the library". I never added the HDD to any of these media libraries and it is causing Media Center to slow to a crawl while it tries to find media files on the HDD.

I do not know anything about Windows 8. However, this is how Vista behaves:

(1) On a freshly-booted system, if I plug in a USB disk, Windows recognises the drive. If I then start Media Center, MC does not see the drive -- the "Video" folder in MC does not show any of the recorded-TV files that are on the USB drive.

(2) On a freshly-booted system, if I start Media Center and then plug in the USB disk, MC displays a panel asking me "What do you want to do?", with the choices offered being:
(a) "Take no action",
(b) "Import pictures and videos",
(c) "View videos".
I always select "Take no action" and that gives an immediate return to the panel I was viewing when I plugged in the disk. As far as I can tell, MC spends no time searching the drive for video files. But I can nevertheless navigate to the "Video" folder within MC and see the video files listed there, arranged in the normal folder hierarchy. And this is all without adding the folders to the MC media library.

If I were to select (b), MC would indeed spend time searching the USB disk for video files. What it is doing is importing the details of the video files into MC's internal database. However, the catch is that if you subsequently start MC without the USB disk connected, MC will think that the files have been deleted and throw away all of the information that it found previously. When you next plug in the USB disk with MC running, the files will appear to be new again, so MC will once again spend time searching the drive for video files. I have no experience with photo or music files, but I suspect that MC would behave the same as it does for video files.

Does Windows 8 behave this way? I have no idea.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[hvinc]

I had this problem back in XP. In Windows 7, it's never been an issue. It's been a long time, so I don't remember exactly what I did.

First, with WMC closed, try changing the drive letter. If that doesn't work, I remember backing up and then reformatting the drive. One or both of those worked years ago for me on XP.

[crawfish]

this is how Vista behaves:
...
(2) On a freshly-booted system, if I start Media Center and then plug in the USB disk, MC displays a panel asking me "What do you want to do?", with the choices offered being:
(a) "Take no action",
(b) "Import pictures and videos",
(c) "View videos".
...
Does Windows 8 behave this way? I have no idea.

There is no question panel in Windows 7 or 8; WMC just goes off on its own and grovels the drive. Your post made me think of Autoplay, which I always disable right after installing Windows, but I can't make it have any effect on the problem in Windows 8.1, which I'm now running. In particular, enabling Autoplay makes Windows 8 put up the "Choose what you want to do" prompt, but WMC just goes off and does its thing and makes the files available. If anybody else wants to test it, you could try rebooting after changing settings, which I didn't do. I just closed and restarted WMC.

What makes it doubly aggravating for me is that I use WMC only for Recorded TV and remove all the other tiles. I had to enable the "Pictures+Videos" section to verify WMC was making the files available. I don't back up Recorded TV, so even in principle, there's no potential benefit to this stupid behavior. I never, ever want it to do this, but damned if I've been able to find a way to make it stoppppppppp.

[aplovisia]

There is no question panel in Windows 7 or 8; WMC just goes off on its own and grovels the drive. Your post made me think of Autoplay, which I always disable right after installing Windows, but I can't make it have any effect on the problem in Windows 8.1, which I'm now running. In particular, enabling Autoplay makes Windows 8 put up the "Choose what you want to do" prompt, but WMC just goes off and does its thing and makes the files available. If anybody else wants to test it, you could try rebooting after changing settings, which I didn't do. I just closed and restarted WMC.

What makes it doubly aggravating for me is that I use WMC only for Recorded TV and remove all the other tiles. I had to enable the "Pictures+Videos" section to verify WMC was making the files available. I don't back up Recorded TV, so even in principle, there's no potential benefit to this stupid behavior. I never, ever want it to do this, but damned if I've been able to find a way to make it stoppppppppp.

When I installed WMC in Windows 8.1, I added folders on a NAS drive to the WMC library. Subsequently, Windows Search started searching those folders which slows it to a crawl whenever I search.

Those folders do not show up in the locations Windows Search is indexing, so I can't figure out how to keep them from being searched. "Libraries" don't show up in Indexing Options either, so no way to exclude them. Anyone else run into this and have a solution?