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USB Eject icon missing in Windows

V

vistadude

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 3, 2010
1,423
1
Does anyone else notice that many flash and usb drives can't be ejected in windows installed through bootcamp? I found this on both XP and windows 7 installed through bootcamp. It's not an issue of the icon being hidden on the taskbar, it simply doesn't show up for certain usb flash drives and usb external hard disks. Normally it's not a problem to unplug an external drive without ejecting, but I'm finding that when I copy files over, wait 2 minutes, and then pull out the usb cable, those files never got transferred over or the folder gets corrupted, and subsequently can't be deleted when connect to any computer.

I also tried the same usb disks on a PC laptop and PC desktop, and those machines showed the safe hardware eject icon. I wonder if there is a certain bootcamp driver version that works better than the current version? Thanks in advance.
 
In W7 and Vista at least the USB Eject Icon (Safely Remove Hardware) doesn't always have to show. Check the drive settings: if they are ""optimize for quick removal" it doesn't show. "optmize for performance" then it should.

Check that setting before troubleshooting further.

B
 
What about ejecting the HDDs via Windows Explorer? While the HDD is not selected, right click on it in the left pane and select EJECT.
 
The drive settings shouldn't change from computer to computer. I don't have all the drives with me at the moment, but they all show up as ejectable in other computers except for the mac with bootcamp.

balamw said:
In W7 and Vista at least the USB Eject Icon (Safely Remove Hardware) doesn't always have to show. Check the drive settings: if they are ""optimize for quick removal" it doesn't show. "optmize for performance" then it should.

Check that setting before troubleshooting further.

B
Click to expand...
 
I don't have an eject option if I do that, even if I do it on my PC computers that have the eject icon in the taskbar... Maybe I am clicking somewhere wrong?

simsaladimbamba said:
What about ejecting the HDDs via Windows Explorer? While the HDD is not selected, right click on it in the left pane and select EJECT.
Click to expand...
 
vistadude said:
The drive settings shouldn't change from computer to computer. I don't have all the drives with me at the moment, but they all show up as ejectable in other computers except for the mac with bootcamp.
Click to expand...

AFAIK the setting is for that particular drive on that particular computer and does not travel with the drive. (It turns off the write cache, which is an OS not hardware function). I could be wrong though.

B
 
Ok, here's the weird thing. If I turn on my computer and start up windows 7, if I plug in each of the external hard drives or flash drives, they all show the eject icon. However, if I plug in a drive later in the day, the icon is not available.

Arggg, anyways my mac OS partition died this afternoon. I'll have to figure out how to reinstall all this stuff all over again.
 
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