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Windows 10 Safely Remove Hardware Icon missing????

dvtrv

dvtrv

Senior member
I've tried the usual methods if task bar options etc, no joy.
I've also searched online, still no joy!!!! 😡

Can someone educate me on this please?

Thank you,

dvtrv
 
well i've got external rd disk drives and can find no way to safely remove.
Any suggestions??

I can't even right click on drive name to remove.

Anyone?
 
I have little faith that they will ever even bother to fix it. There is actually more than one problem. Even if you do figure out how to eject it, it could pop up a message saying it cant because files are still in use. What a joke. So do a shutdown, thinking that will let you remove it. But then it gets stuck shutting down! Windows is a bottomless rabbit hole of these kinds of problems, and they rarely if ever actually fix these issues. A couple days ago, I plugged in my SD card from my camera, and the damn thing wouldnt read the card, because it says the previous driver was loaded and couldnt be unloaded. What the heck kind of crap is that? What is this windows 98? I have to reboot my frickin computer just to download a frickin picture? This crap is getting worse not better.
 
Check the option to always show all icons and notifications. You can remove those that have settings to hide the icon as you please.
 
sm625 said:
Even if you do figure out how to eject it, it could pop up a message saying it cant because files are still in use.
Click to expand...

Wait...what on earth do you want windows to do there? It can ask nicely for programs to release their file handles, but if they don't (either because they've leaked a handle or they're actually using it) what do you want Windows to do?

  • Remove drive even though it's in use, potentially interrupting an ongoing write and leading to data loss/corruption
  • Kill the application that has the handle. Possibly also leading to data corruption if there is an ongoing write, but also possibly causing data loss if you had changes not yet saved
  • Do nothing and try to let the application gracefully close/release the handle.

Try opening a file and holding a handle to it in OSX and then try ejecting the drive - it'll give you a very familiar error there too.
 
Windows probably didn't detect it as a removable drive.

Try the following:

Go to This PC
Right click the drive in question
Select Properties
Select the Hardware tab
Once again select the drive in question
Click the Properties button
Click the Change settings button on the General tab
Select the Policies tab
Select Quick removal
Confirm your choices
 
dvtrv said:
well i've got external rd disk drives and can find no way to safely remove.
Any suggestions??

I can't even right click on drive name to remove.

Anyone?
Click to expand...

To enable a drive to be shown on the "Safely remove hardware & eject media" applet, there are a few conditions that MUST be met.
1) enable hotswap in the BIOS. It may be called other things, like ESR or whatever else.
2) drivers must support it, that usually means, you CAN'T use MS's drivers, you must use the chipset maker's drivers. For example, if you have an AMD system, then you should be using the AMD drivers, not the default MS ones.
3) obviously, the device's interface needs to support it as well.

Since the OP told us basically nothing, not what kind of system, not what kind of device, then, not much more that can be said.
 
I have grown to ignore this icon over the years. I never used it, and have never had a failure from unplugging a USB device, but I know everyone has different experiences.

As an example, the icon is always there on my laptop, pointing to the DVD drive. Considering this is no media in the drive, I would never want to hit eject on the drive, so I don't even know what the icon is doing there.
 
I'm sooooooo excited to be able to share something
that WORKS.... and, so far, it's worked to restore
the missing volume icon and now, the safely remove
hardware icon...

Cake and Pie...... right click on the task bar and
open Task Manager...

Locate Windows Explorer ==> Right Click on Windows
Explorer and click on RESTART ...... VOILA!!!!!

the icons are restored!!!!!
 
RampantAndroid said:
Wait...what on earth do you want windows to do there? It can ask nicely for programs to release their file handles, but if they don't (either because they've leaked a handle or they're actually using it) what do you want Windows to do?

  • Remove drive even though it's in use, potentially interrupting an ongoing write and leading to data loss/corruption
  • Kill the application that has the handle. Possibly also leading to data corruption if there is an ongoing write, but also possibly causing data loss if you had changes not yet saved
  • Do nothing and try to let the application gracefully close/release the handle.

Try opening a file and holding a handle to it in OSX and then try ejecting the drive - it'll give you a very familiar error there too.
Click to expand...


I found one of Windows 7's annoyances (that still hasn't been fixed) was its tendency to refuse to let you do things on the grounds that some folder or file was 'in use', when it patently wasn't. You could shut down every other application and still it would insist something was using the folder/file in question. This comes up with renaming folders on your internal drive, and with unplugging external devices. Often I'd just unplug the damn thing regardless, because windows was talking nonsense as nothing was 'accessing the device'.

Granted, its possible this is partly down to application software not properly releasing files, but it happened an awful lot, and there is no easy way to find out what it is that is supposedly using the resource.
 
pmv said:
I found one of Windows 7's annoyances (that still hasn't been fixed) was its tendency to refuse to let you do things on the grounds that some folder or file was 'in use', when it patently wasn't. You could shut down every other application and still it would insist something was using the folder/file in question. This comes up with renaming folders on your internal drive, and with unplugging external devices. Often I'd just unplug the damn thing regardless, because windows was talking nonsense as nothing was 'accessing the device'.

Granted, its possible this is partly down to application software not properly releasing files, but it happened an awful lot, and there is no easy way to find out what it is that is supposedly using the resource.
Click to expand...

Do you know it wasn't in use? Did you open up process explorer and look at what processes held handles to items on that drive? There are ways to see what is accessing a file. There could well have been a bug in Windows, but until someone is able to say that nothing is holding a handle to a file, I'll go with it isn't a bug 😉
 
RampantAndroid said:
Do you know it wasn't in use? Did you open up process explorer and look at what processes held handles to items on that drive? There are ways to see what is accessing a file. There could well have been a bug in Windows, but until someone is able to say that nothing is holding a handle to a file, I'll go with it isn't a bug 😉
Click to expand...

Well, my suspicion is its at least sometimes down to certain applications not releasing a file, even after the application itself should have stopped using it or isn't even running any more.

But at the very least the OS should tell you directly which application is causing the problem, and give you the option to tell it to ignore it because its obviously wrong.

In general windows seems very reluctant to believe the user knows more than it does! See also it's refusal to stay hibernated when told to do so, unless disconnected from power.
 
You know how many times I use that icon?

Almost never all the way back to XP. I write my files to the USB drive, wait several seconds after the write is done and the drive activity light stops blinking (to make sure it is actually done), and yank the drive.

My computer has the remove hardware icon for all my drives for some dumb reason (even though it is not set to hot swap in BIOS), always has on this motherboard in both Windows 7 and 10. Even has it for my C: drive, like sure, I want to eject that!
 
SparkyJJO said:
You know how many times I use that icon?

Almost never all the way back to XP. I write my files to the USB drive, wait several seconds after the write is done and the drive activity light stops blinking (to make sure it is actually done), and yank the drive.

My computer has the remove hardware icon for all my drives for some dumb reason (even though it is not set to hot swap in BIOS), always has on this motherboard in both Windows 7 and 10. Even has it for my C: drive, like sure, I want to eject that!
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think the issues come down to driver/hardware rather than Windows. Same thing on my desktop, all my hard drives show up on the "remove hardware" icon, which is annoying because I have 3 internal drives...
 
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