Missing "Safely Remove Hardware" Icon

[Guest]

Whenever I plug in an external device (e.g., digital camera) into my USB
port, I obtain the "safely remove hardware" icon in the system tray. I
recently purchased a new Western Digital external hard drive for backups.
After I plug it in, it is recognized by the system (and I can see it in
Explorer) and I can perform my backups, but the "safely remove hardware" icon
never appears in the tray. I've tried "add/remove hardware" from the control
panel, but the drive doesn't show to allow me to remove it safely. I
contacted WDC, but they basically sent me some links to Microsoft which
really did not help. So, why doesn't the icon display, and how might I
safely remove the hardware otherwise? Thanks.

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

If you right-click the drive in Explorer, you should see an "eject" option if
Windows understands the drive is removable. That should do the same thing.
[You need to be displaying the contents of another drive when you do this, or
"My Computer" so that Explorer itself isn't referencing the drive at the time.]

If the eject menu option isn't present then Windows doesn't understand that this is
a removable media device and you'll need to approach that problem with WD. You
can look in disk manager and removable storage manager to see a little more
about what Windows understands about it.

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.