Jan 22, 2018 - There is a right way and a wrong way to eject a USB device or memory card on your Mac. Follow these tips.

How To Safely Disconnect an External Drive from your Computer Removing the drive from a Windows Computer: Disconnecting or 'safe removal' of an external drive from your PC is handled by the Windows Safely Remove program. The following are the steps necessary to safely remove an external drive from your Windows computer: Note: Failure to follow this procedure may result in data loss to an external drive. • Double-click on the Safely Remove icon in your Windows System Tray. This will launch the Safely Remove program. Note: In Windows this icon can sometimes be hidden. Simply click on the up arrow and proceed.

• The Safely Remove window will display any/all detected USB/FireWire devices connected to your Windows computer. If necessary click/check the Display device components box to expand the view. • Click on the device (e.g., external drive) you wish to remove and click on the Stop button. Software for macs. • A confirmation window will appear.

Once again, select the device you wish to remove and click on the OK button. • A pop-up window displays notifying you that it is now safe to remove the device. You can either close the pop-up window or it will close by itself. You can now power down/disconnect your external drive from your computer. Note: At times while Safely Removing an external drive, Windows may show a warning that the external drive is busy and cannot be disconnected.

If this occurs: • Try again to Safely Remove the device • Shut down your computer and then disconnect the external drive Removing the drive from a Mac Computer: In Mac OS the drive appears as an icon on the desktop. Before unplugging the drive, it needs to be dismounted by dragging the drive to the Trash Can. Wait a few seconds after the drive has gone into the Trash Can; once the activity light has gone out, you can safely remove the drive. Once the drive is turned off, disconnect the interface cable.

I have several USB devices, and I’m used to using the “safely remove hardware” icon in the taskbar before I unplug any of them. All of a sudden that icon has disappeared, and I see no way to “safely remove hardware”.

What do I do? Can I just unplug the device I want to remove anyway? Or do I need to every time this happens?

This happens to me all the time. The remove hardware icon in the taskbar’s disappears occasionally for reasons unknown. I’ve never actually had a problem just unplugging the device anyway, but it still makes me feel uncomfortable doing so.

So, I stumbled onto a fairly reasonable workaround. Become a and go ad-free! Normally, when you have a removable USB device installed, Windows displays a small icon in the notification area (the right most collection of icons) of your task bar: If you hover your mouse over it you’ll see it’s tool-tip: “Safely Remove Hardware”. The purpose of “Safely Remove Hardware” is simple: it’s how you tell Windows that you’re about to remove a device so that Windows can finish whatever it needs to do with it. In the case of disks, for example, Windows flushes all disk buffers, avoiding things like potential corruption. And that’s the fear – if you remove something like a USB thumb drive without first telling Windows, it’s possible to corrupt the contents of the drive.

In practice that doesn’t happen often, but it’s possible. The problem is that occasionally, for reasons unknown, the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon can disappear. Even though there are devices installed that require it – it’s nowhere to be found. When this happens, what I’ve found is that you can click on Start, Run, and type in: RunDll32.exe shell32.,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll And press OK.

That will bring up the “Safely Remove Hardware” dialog: From this dialog you can click on the device you want to remove, and press Stop. Once Windows is done with it, you can then remove the device.

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Of course a side effect I noticed when I did this was that the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon reappeared. If it happens often enough, you can create a desktop shortcut for that geeky looking command. Right click on your desktop, click on New, and then click on Shortcut. In the resulting enter that “RunDLL32” command listed above.

That will bring up the “Safely Remove Hardware” dialog: Click on Next and change the name to “Safely Remove Hardware”: Now, whenever you need to remove hardware, and the icon isn’t present on the taskbar notification area, you can simply double click on this new shortcut and get the job done. • - Two techniques to remove the Windows 10 offer icon, including a more generally useful approach to notification icons. • - 'Device cannot be stopped' can be a frustrating error if there's no obvious cause. Turning off device power or unplugging anyway isn't really safe. • - Creating shortcuts to programs and web pages on your desktop is relatively easy, as is setting a custom icon for those shortcuts. I'll show you how.