Remove Hardware "not removing" hard drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Hiya,

I recently wiped my laptop and reinstalled everything, so this is confusing
me to no end. I always use Safely Remove Hardware to disconnect my external
HD before turning it off/disconnecting it. Everything seems to happen as it
should, I even get the little tooltips balloon telling me it's safe to
remove, and the drive disappears from windows explorer.

However, whenever I get the Save or Save As.. dialog (seems like any
program), the drive (drives, since it's partitioned) is there. Try to select
it, I get an error message saying the location is unavailable (not too
surprising). Plugging in the HD at this point now doesn't work/show up and
the Remove Hardware and a few other things (e.g., Device manager) don't work,
or act funny. Right as I power down the hard drive I'll see it show up very
briefly in explorer with a red question mark but then it disappears.
Shutdown, reboot, even logging off windows will correct it, but it's annoying
for someone who almost always only sleeps or hibernates his laptop.

oh, probably an important detail, the drive is in an IDE/USB2 enclosure,
connected via a USB/PCI card. I know that plugging into the laptop's
built-in usb1.1 port will allow the drives to show up again (I figure it's
similar to plugging into the USB2 port the first time after bootup), haven't
tried seeing if it has a similar second-try problem yet.

I've done a few tweaks here and there (mostly from pcstats or tweakui), but
I wouldn't have thought any of them to be related to removing hardware.

Ideas, thoughts?
Thanks for your time.
Eddie
 
Hi Eddie,

I have a similar setup here, but with a difference. When I stop and remove
the USB device, the drive icon is gone within a second. It does not appear
in Windows Explorer or Disk Management. So it seems that this refresh is not
happening automatically on your system and hence the confusion.

Go to Disk Management. Start>Run>diskmgmt.msc. The Refresh option on the
Action menu, allows you to refresh the displayed disk and volume information
about drive letters and removable media. Click on Refresh and the drive
should disappear from Disk Management & Windows Explorer.

Alternatively, you can just open Windows Explorer and hit F5(for refresh).

Now check whether there are any issues. Let us know if this helps.

Abhilash
 
hitting F5 in windows explorer never worked, BUT meanwhile: I'm not sure if
it's because of something else I did (I've been tinkering) or because of
using disk management, but everything seems to be working fine now. Thanks
for the suggestion, regardless!

(the biggest tinkering I did was to use tweakUI to limit the drives to the
three that the external HDD would fill up... once the drives had no problem,
replacing all the check marks to allow up to z: didn't have any adverse
effects, either, so _something_ worked!)

thanks for your time,
Eddie
 
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