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

Read the article that everyone's commenting on.
Subscribe to the RSS Feed for comments on this article.

I found this very useful creating the "Safely Remove Hardware" shortcut on my desktop. :) There is also another work-around through the Device Manager where if for instance its an EXT USB HD then one can click on the sub-heading disk drives in Device Manager and then select the HD in question by right clicking it and selecting properties then click on the second tab "Policies" and at the bottom where it says "Optimize for Perfomanace" you will see "Safely Remove Hardware". Just click on "Safely Remove Hardware" and the Safely Remove Hardware Tool will pop-up. Hope it helps :)

Hello. I've just read this article and I'm having the exact opposite problem. I've got the safely remove hardware icon next to my clock, but I've got no external devices plugged into any of the slots of my USB storage device (drives F,G,H, and I). Also, when I try to remove the mysterious "generic audio devices" from these drives using the remove hardware dialog box, the drives become unusable until I restart my system. Any way of telling the computer that there are no cards or devices plugged into these slots and that it should stop prompting me to remove what isn't there?? Thanks for your help!

You can disable the write cache so that you can remove the thumb drive without going through the "safely remove" routine. Generally the write cache is of minimal benefit anyway when writing to such a device. To disable, plug in the device,
right click My Computer, choose properties, choose the Hardware tab, choose Device Manager, choose Disk drives, right-click your device and choose properties, choose Policies tag, then click on the radio button for "Optimize for quick removal". Click OK and you'll be able to remove the thumb drive anytime you want as long as nothing is being written to the device. (lots of clicks, huh...)

To the best of my understanding, the problem stems from a power breakdown and subsequent recovery - with the USB not plugged-in. The VERY VERY SIMPLE remedy that I've found is to plug-in the USB device and RESTART the machine. BINGO, the icon is there.
Danny

Wow, this was exactly what I needed. Actually, I was just looking for a nice website with the instructions on how to do it the longer way (I found out this way but forgot where: Control Panel/System/Hardware/Device Manager/Disk Drive/Properties/policies link) but this shortcut is amazing! If anyone was wondering where to find the icon you would normally see in the tray to use as the icon of your newly created shortcut and/or how to change it, just right click the shortcut you created, select Properties, then click Change Icon under the Shortcut tab and browse for that hotplug.dll (should be here: C:\WINDOWS\system32\hotplug.dll).

Thanks Leo! This happens all the time on my Thinkpad T42, but has never happened on my Thinkpad T30. Strange. This should be fixed by the software programmers. Especially since they have forced all computers to report failures over the Internet to them. They seem to have missed this one. I wonder if IBM or Microsoft is to blame?

Thanks!

For those who need it, the 'default' icon for the 'Safely Remove Hardware' program is located in a file called 'hotplug.dll'.

I have Windows Vista. Whenever I use a USB memory stick and I'm finished, I click on Safely Remove Hardware, but I get a message saying that it is unable to disconnect because something is in use. But I get this message when all applications are closed. I tried looking at the Task Manager, and it shows no applications running. When I look in Properties of the memory stick's drive the indexing box is unchecked, so it's not that. I end up having to shut down the computer in order to pull out the memory stick. How can I find out what's going on and fix it?

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Your USB Ram stick was probably assigned a drive letter (D:, E: or something
like that). Search for that using Process Explorer
(http://ask-leo.com/d-procexp) - "find handle" function. That could tell you
what program is accessing the device.

Leo

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFGpnfgCMEe9B/8oqERApZyAJ4wSVmdoYijxyvVRT8S6CImDbvjsQCfR3ZR
c/NLdSrFFqfFd8CDPwphMjo=
=91rj
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

The person who finds the answer to the following will become the grand national champion of all computer gurus, because this has never been addressed in all of my searches:

SecureType May 19, 2007 | 1:36 pm

For windows Vista, there was a “Safely Remove” right-click context menu item for a removable hard drive on my HP media center PC. This has disappeared, and it was much easier to use, like the “Eject” command, than using the tray icon. You didn’t have to sort thru a bunch of cryptic devices to remove the one you needed.

How do we get this context menu item back?

To post a comment on "Safely Remove Hardware: where did the icon go? How do I safely remove hardware without it?", please return to that article's main page.