i feel like an idiot posting this

[Mr. Switch]

but i got a new external HD, and for the life of me, i cannot figure out how to eject it out of windows 7 without shutting the computer down. The "remove mass storage device" thing in the taskbar doesn't pop up, and when i right click on the drive, eject isn't an option like it is on memory cards or flash drives.

I'm obviously missing something here.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

bahahahah whada idiot hahahahaha.
jks mate

Try right clicking on the task bar and customise which icons it shows. Maybe you hid the 'remove mass sotrage device' arrow thing at one point. Make sure it's set to always show for now.

 

[MindoverMaster]

If you are running Windows 7, click the Start button, go to Devices and Printers. There, you can eject it.

 

[Mr. Switch]

I've tried all those thigns, funny thing is that it's not listed under devices and printers, and even though i do have the taskbar icon active, i still can't eject it, it acts like another internal drive.

 

[joelm3103]

This might be pretty way off but see if this helps.

Intermittently, some application/process would have a lock on some file on the drive that would keep Windows from safely ejecting it.

After looking into it, I found that it was actually the Windows search service that was accessing the drive! Since I wasn't using Windows search to look for stuff on these drives, I removed them as locations to index.

To do this in Windows 7, you need to go to Indexing Options (just type “Indexing” into the search box in the Start menu…). One of the choices displayed will then be Indexing Options, so click on it and you should then see a window similar to this:

Source

It's kind of late and I was looking it up, didn't find much though. If I find anything tomorrow I'll edit my post or just post any solutions at hand.