XP: Remove hardware safely not coming up when USB drives inserted?

AirWolf

AirWolf

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Hi

I'm having a problem with one XP machine at work where the "remove hardware safely" green arrow doesn't come up near the clock anymore. I searched around on Google but haven't found a fix yet.

Any ideas?:)
 
hmm nope

i never remove anything safely and have yet to see if damage my usb sticks and external hdd
 
Funny. Have been experiencing the same problems recently and also wanted to start a similar thread, but all seems to be ok now.
 
Not sure bout the disappearing icon, but are you sure you even need to safely remove? One only needs to safely remove on drives that have write-caching enabled. Usually this is off. Assuming, of course, that you aren't writing to the drive.
 
I had this issue yesterday when my PC had a brain-fart and rebooted by itself (turned out to be a memory leak) - my icon disappeard and I could not safely remove the memory stick - I found a fix that seemed to work -- try clicking Start -> Run and copy/paste the following line:

%SystemRoot%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

Click OK and see if the icon returns after instering a Mem Stick or similar hot-plug USB device - it worked for me and the icon now shows in the tray again. You may have to reboot your PC for it to work correctly again.

You can also try right-clicking the taskbar and selecting Properties - make sure that the "Hide Inactive Icons checkbox is unticked - if you want it ticked, the go into the Customise section and make sure that the icon shows as "Always SHow"

Let me know if this works
 
Last edited:
Thanks Howard. From this, you can actually make a batch file. Then instead of copying and pasting, all you do is double-click the batch file. For those of you who doesn't know how to do it, all you do is copy and paste the code that Howard has given us, into notepad. Then save the file as "whatever_name_you_prefer.bat". Make sure to include quotes when you save this file. Else it won't save it as a ".bat", but instead it will save it as ".bat.txt".
 
mercurial said:
Thanks Howard. From this, you can actually make a batch file. Then instead of copying and pasting, all you do is double-click the batch file. For those of you who doesn't know how to do it, all you do is copy and paste the code that Howard has given us, into notepad. Then save the file as "whatever_name_you_prefer.bat". Make sure to include quotes when you save this file. Else it won't save it as a ".bat", but instead it will save it as ".bat.txt".
Click to expand...

So true - otherwise just paste a short-cut on the desktop and run when needed (if it disappears again). After I ran this on my PC, there was no need to run it again, even after a few reboots - touch wood...
 
howardb said:
So true - otherwise just paste a short-cut on the desktop and run when needed (if it disappears again). After I ran this on my PC, there was no need to run it again, even after a few reboots - touch wood...
Click to expand...

Yip, you can create a shortcut as well. Mine's behaving nively at the moment :p
 
mercurial said:
Better than Vista though :p
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've found that when doing the Safe Remove thing on Vista, it does not power down my WD Passport drive, which then makes an annoying click when unplugging it. Where on XP, the drive powers down nicely.
 
howardb said:
I had this issue yesterday when my PC had a brain-fart and rebooted by itself (turned out to be a memory leak) - my icon disappeard and I could not safely remove the memory stick - I found a fix that seemed to work -- try clicking Start -> Run and copy/paste the following line:

%SystemRoot%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

Click OK and see if the icon returns after instering a Mem Stick or similar hot-plug USB device - it worked for me and the icon now shows in the tray again. You may have to reboot your PC for it to work correctly again.

You can also try right-clicking the taskbar and selecting Properties - make sure that the "Hide Inactive Icons checkbox is unticked - if you want it ticked, the go into the Customise section and make sure that the icon shows as "Always SHow"

Let me know if this works
Click to expand...

That command brings up the "Safely Remove Hardware" window but not the little green arrow in the taskbar:(. So I'll just create a quicklaunch icon with the .bat file:).
 
Saule said:
That command brings up the "Safely Remove Hardware" window but not the little green arrow in the taskbar:(. So I'll just create a quicklaunch icon with the .bat file:).
Click to expand...

After it brings up the window, and you remove the hardware, close the window and reboot - your little green icon should be back in the tray...

...if not, check the "Hide Inactive Icons" settings on the taskbar properties...
 
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