How to Safely Remove a USB Hard Drive
If you remove a usb drive without first telling Windows, it is possible to corrupt the contents of the drive. It doesn’t happen often, but it is possible. The reason this happens is because Windows doesn’t always immediately write everything to your external drive each time you use it. Instead, it often writes over a longer period of time by holding the data in memory.
When unplugging your drive, some of the data you think transferred to your usb hard drive may actually still be in your computer’s memory.
Why risk it? You should tell windows every time you want to unplug your device. This allows windows to write anything that hasn’t already been written to the drive and saves you from the huge headache of losing your valuable data.
Using a Windows Feature to Safely Remove Your USB Hard Drive,
When you have a removable portable usb hard drive installed, Windows displays a small icon in the notification area (the right most collection of icons) of your task bar. When you hover over the icon, you will see a tool-tip that says, “safely remove hardware.” Simply click the icon in your system tray and select the device you want to unplug, then click “stop,” and wait until Windows indicates that it’s safe to remove the device. That’s it, you’re done and all your files should be safely stored and retrievable from your USB hard drive.
Commonly Encountered Messages and Their Solutions
Whenever I try to use the “Safely Remove Hardware” option I get the message:
The device cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later.
This message means that a process is keeping your portable USB hard drive tied-up. Try downloading Filemon for Windows from http://www.sysinternals.com. This little program allows you to see what processes are keeping your device busy so that you can disable them and properly remove your drive.
The little green icon on the lower right corner of the task bar is no longer there. I no longer have the “Safely Remove Hardware” function available.
The solution is to bring back the “safely remove hardware” window when the icon is missing. First, make sure that the “safely remove hardware icon” is not set as “always hide.” You can do this by right clicking the time in your taskbar and selecting “customize notifications.”
The “customize notifications” dialog box contains a list box that is divided into “current items” and “past items” sections. You can change the display status for any icon listed in either section. To do this, click the icon and then click the drop-down button that appears next to the current status (“hide when inactive” is the default setting for all of the icons). In order to have the icon displayed in the notification area, click “always show,” in this pop-up menu. In order to have the icon appear in this area, click “always “hide instead. The manual way of bringing back the “safely remove hardware” window is by running a command. Go to start, run, type in rundll32 shell32.dll control_rundll hotplug.dll and click OK.
A USB hard drive is a tremendously useful device for everyday computer users not to mention the increased storage capacity of newer drives. If you follow this guide you should not have any trouble properly removing your device.
