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It happens at times when we need to unplug a USB key from our CPU but find the “Safely Remove Hardware” missing from the system tray. Another painful thing that we experience sometimes is to see the under shown message when we try to safely remove the hardware.
Here we are listing a few tips on how to fix such irritating events:
Use Windows Run command to get to the “Safely Remove Hardware” dialogue box:
1. Go to Start–>Run and enter the following text into Run dialogue box
RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
2. After you press OK you see the undergiven dialogue box:
From here you can safely unplug your USB key.
Create a shortcut for the above procedure:
- Right click anywhere on your desktop and hover over “New” and click the “Shortcut” option.
- Copy and paste this text into the box where it’s asking for the location of the item: RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
- Click Next.
- Give your shortcut any name (e.g. Safely Remove Hardware) and click the “Finish” button
- You can change the look of your icon by going to “Properties” of your shortcut.
Install a windows utility to safely remove hardware:
EjectUSB is a useful Windows utility that you can check out. This program closes all programs running from your USB device and then safely ejects the USB drive.. Also, EjectUSB offers flushing of the file cache, closing Explorer windows and removing registry entries and Recent Document shortcuts from the specified USB drive.
Using EjectUSB
- Extract the contents of the zip file into your USB device.
- Run the “EjectUSB.exe” from the USB device that you want to eject.
- EjectUSB does rest of the work.
Download EjectUSB.
Optimize your USB drive if you dont want to go with the above given tips
- Right click on the USB drive icon in My Computer.
- Click the Hardware tab.
- Select the desired USB drive and open its Properties.
- Now click on Policies tab.
- Check the radio button that says: “Optimize for quick removal“.
This setting will disable the write caching on the disk that allows you to disconnect the drive without using the “Safely Remove Hardware” option.
I hope you know you can just pop the drive out with no ill effects at any time, unless its being written to when you do.
That safely remove hardware crap is useless.
Cheers.
Just a side note to Dazed, given that ill effects are experienced sometimes – something which cannot be disputed, your point is moot.
To expand on that, NTFS-formatted thumbdrives (and I’m assuming other advanced filesystems) do return an error if removed incorrectly; Microsoft, who ironically coded the error handling in the first place, simple resets the log and doesn’t say anything. The error, I think, has to do with journaling filesystems, so it might exist in other filesystems using that theory.
That said, there should be no corruption unless you pull in the middle of the write sequence, which is a good deal more complex in NTFS than FAT for examples, meaning you’re more likely to catch it.
I’m still looking for an article that would tell me how to safely remove when it has been deactivated by the administrator; short thinking admins couldn’t see the legitimate use.