Safely Remove Hardware: where did the icon go? How do I safely remove hardware without it?

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Thanks much Leo, what a great tip (I just can't wait to share it with others, lol); and by the way, I really love these various functions hidden in the rundll32.exe library ...

Maybe just one possibly related thing to note; I've noticed that if I plug my USB drive into one of the available USB ports, that icon doesn't appear at all in the first place (the window on the other hand does appear), and I can't use that port at all (i.e. the drive doesn't appear in the list of available drives), while also, I think that plugging-in the USB drive into that particular port (if I recall correctly) generates the message saying something like: "The drive will not work at its maximum speed..." (and adds: "...but it is possible to use it at the maximum speed.", or again, something like that.

________

take cares,
Ivan Tadej, Slovenija, EU
http://www.tadej-ivan.be/

I have an old version (512MB) mp3 player which I connect to the computer every now and then but I don't often (almost never) use the 'Safely Remove Hardware' to remove my device. Sometime some of the music stops playing in the middle. I wonder if my arrogance is causing the problem.

I've tried EVERY solution I could find on the internet. SHortcuts, changing the hardware settings, etc, etc... I found that the REAL problem is UpNp. As soon as I disabled UpNp, the icon came back and I've never had any problems with it. I found a small download that easily and safely disables UpNp at : http://www.grc.com/unpnp/unpnp.htm. UpNp was the real problem, all the other things were just short fixes.

Thanks to Leo for the RunDll32 tip! In many cases one can just unplug the USB device without using Safely remove.. However, it appears to me that when updating a Briefcase XP is slow to flush the buffers and I frequently end up with the Briefcase broken. This will hopefully solve the problem. Per

Thanks!

I have been getting serious about keeping 2-3 backup copies of my digital photos (I've taken over 40,000 at this point), and I just had to datamine a &*%$@ Maxtor 300GB drive to claim some stuff thatwas single stored (I used Nucleus Kernel NTFS) to get the images off a 'corrupted' drive)

I haven't been using the 'safely remove' because the stupid icon was always MIA

I googled remove disk safely icon - and this page was near the top - Thanks!

Hey thanks for the tip on how to bring up the "safely remove hardware icon" back up. But I have a problem. So I have a Canon Powershot s2 camera and whenever I connect it via a usb to my laptop, the "safely remove hardware icon" doesn't show up. When I do your "RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll" I do get the "Safely Remove Hardware" box up, but my camera is not listed there? How do I get my camera to show under the "Safely Remove Hardware" box. It used to show up there long time ago. I can access my camera from my laptop etc., I just don't know of a safe way to unplug its usb. Do you have any ideas?

Thanks!

- S

I tried the first time typing in ignoring Capital letters and it didnt work. So now I realized that you pretty much have to type in exactly the way you see on the web, with all that Capital letters and stuffs.
Some of the devices that didnt appear even when you called the list up may be becuase they are set to be that way? Some of USB locks for certain software are that way.
Thankyou very much Leo.

The URL for the download is now

http://www.grc.com/UnPnP/UnPnP.htm

Works like a charm-thanks! to terrycotter: To get the icon (assuming you are using XPSP2) copy and paste this path for the location of the icon %SystemRoot%\$NtServicePackUninstall$\hotplug.dll
You could also do a system search for hotplug.dll with a file size of 134KB.
Good luck!

...Another way to safely remove hardware without using the shortcut is to navigate to My Computer, right click on any storage device->properties->hardware->highlight the device that you want to remove->properties->policies tab->there you will find Safely Remove Hardware link in blue. Click on it and voila!

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