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

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Very useful. Thanks Leo. Also the Safely Remove Hardware icon is in the hotplug.dll if you want to make your shortcut pretty. The hotplug.dll is in the system32 dir under your windows dir.

An easy way to keep the "safely remove hardware" icon on the taskbar is to simply right click on it (near the area where the time is displayed), select "customize notifications", select customize again and then change the safely remove hardware icon to "always show". If your machine gets confused about when it should show it, this will fix it. This also works for removing the icon as well.

Hi,
Other way is to diconnect USB from computer is just Go in My-Computer select the concerned USB drive Right Click and select EJECT, then Windows flush all disk buffers to avoiding things like potential corruption. and you can remove ur USB from machine.

Mahesh Chavan

I removed a thumb drive without safely removing it and when I plugged it in again it came up as unformatted - all data gone. It may not happen often, bit it happens!

The eject drive method does not work as it tells me "is currently busy" etc :-(((
Your (magical) rundll32 solution is JUST GREAT! I created the shortcut, and it stays now proudly on my desktop!
thank you thank you thank you thank you !

I noticed that after I installed the newest update to my computer that my safely remove hardware icon along with three other icons have disappeared and I can download the programs to get them back but they don't stay once I have to restart my computer. I also no longer have any dates where I can set my computer back to a different date and when I tried the run command that you have to get the safely remove hardware back RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll I got an error message that said: Run DLL: Erro in shell32.dll missing entry:Control_RunDLL Would you know why this would happen after a windows download. I have winXP the other programs are Webshots, Weather desktop,and the icon to show that my virus scan is running along with my remove hardware icon. Please help thank you

Hi - this happened to me this morning, so thanks for the tip. Just thought I'd post (so that people take this seriously) that I bought last summer a Maxtor external hard drive (for foreign publications I subscribe to in PDF - I tend do download them at work because it's faster) - NOTHING in their literature said that the safely-remove-hardware step was necessary before unplugging it; I only had that icon because I also have a plug-in wireless card. I learned that it was necessary the hard way, when a few files (just the ones I'd downloaded that day) were corrupted. Worst comes to worst and you can't "safely remove" your hardware the proper way, at least wait until the device seems to be idle.

I found that windows has two groups of items in its taskbar: Current items and past items. Now when the 'safely remove hardware' icon is moved to the past items it is not visible, even when its property is set to "show always". Probably the meaning of this is that Current items are active and Past items are non-active. You can see tis when you open the propertis of the taskbar. When I applied the work around mentioned here , the function/item is moved to Current (active) items.
My conclusion is that in the registry somewhere this property is set and reset by certain triggers like our work around.It would be nice if we can move items btween these 2 groups in the properties window of the taskbar.

Just a tiny but nice add-on to the neat article on getting the icon to reappear in the taskbar.
After setting up the shortcut on the desktop, right click on it and choose "properties", then "change icon". In the browse space browse to "hotplug.dll"
You will then be offered the REAL icon, not just a blank sheet of paper. Choose that and you have the instantly recognizable icon on your desktop.

Thank God for BLOGS! This happened to me the other day. I was thinking what did I or my kids do now to the computer to make the icon vanish. This is a life saver advise since I use so many USB attachments with not enough USB ports. Knowing the safely remove is ready from experience and know I could not live without it. I dreaded the thought of rebooting everytime just to disconnect a USB device each time. THANKS A MILLION!

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