I spent about 6 hours today, trying to figure out what was interfering with safely removing my WD Passport. I read everything on the web and here, and in the knowledgebase (pretty good, but not good enough). I just can’t believe how difficult this was to figure out. How the heck does WD sell any of these with such a big problem and no clear instructions for solving it? Amazingly, the solution is not too hard, once you figure it out. But WD should make this solution REALLY CLEAR in their user manual! I thought I would share 
Always click on the WD SmartWare icon in your system tray and click on Safely remove the drive. This will dismount all volumes and turn off the drive. Don’t use Windows Safely Remove Hardware.
If that doesn’t work:
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Go to Windows Explorer and find your external drive under Computer. Right click drive, go to Properties, uncheck indexing.
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Make sure your anti-virus program is not scanning your removable drives. You might have to uncheck them in more than one location in your A/V settings.
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Be sure Carbonite, WD Smartware, or any other continuous backup program is not scanning the drive. If you have Carbonite, right click on your drive letter in Computer (Windows Explorer) and stop Carbonite from backing it up.
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Download the freeware, Unlocker, to see what services are using your drive if it won’t shut down. End those services.
5. You also might go into Control Panel, Device Manager, Disks, right click your external drive, go to Properties, Policies, and optimize for removal, not performance. There seems to be a debate about whether this is necessary.
You can always shut down the computer and then unplug the drive. This works every time without fail. But it is extremely inconvenient. Most people seem to believe that it is still unsafe to yank the cord, although a lot of people do it. Personally, I do not want to risk data loss, which may be the consequence.
Cheers!
