Unexpected forced dismount

[Fezbling]

I've had problems with Veracrypt force dismounting volumes, and thought I had solved them by both changing my system's sleep settings and unchecking "force auto dismount even if volume contains open files..." in Veracrypt's settings.

However today I had a drive (force) dismount even as I was working on a file on the mounted volume. So neither the laptop nor the drive could have gone to sleep (at least shouldn't have). And I know the power did not go out.

Any thoughts on what could have caused this? Especially since I have the preferences set to NOT auto dismount a drive if it would be forced.

• It's an external Seagate hard drive, plugged into a docking station which is connected via USB to the laptop.
• I think I encrypted the entire device rather than a partition or container (how to check this?)
• Windows 10 Home, v. 1903, 64-bit
• Veracrypt v. 1.23-Hotfix-2, 64-bit
• Windows Defender

I hadn't changed or upgraded any software recently. I had been working on the drive fine all day.

In another thread I saw a suggestion to change the power settings for USB devices, but for some reason I don't see any USB settings or options where this is supposed to appear. But again, there's no reason the drive should have changed its power setting during active use.

I was able to remount it immediately after, with no apparent data loss, but it's distressing that this happened unprompted while working on a file on the mounted volume.

Thanks for any help.

[Adrian Kentleton]

Just a thought: if this was still happening to me, after making those various configuration changes, I'd suspect a hardware problem. Do you sometimes still have the issue if you connect the drive directly to the laptop?

[Fezbling]

Good question. I'll connect directly to laptop and see if it happens again.