Ext HDD not in "Safely Remove Hardware"

[Nubbleet]

I have a 250GB WD Ext HDD. It's USB powered. It works perfectly, except today it stopped showing up in the "Safely Remove Hardware" box (XP 32 Bit). It didn't pop up in the sys tray so I opened the "Safely Remove Hardware" manually and my ext hdd wasnt there. It shows up in my computer and stuff and it's fully functional except for the fact it's not in safely remove hardware. Windows recognizes it as "WD 2500BEV External USB Device" under device manager, so I know it's still recognized as an external USB device. How can I add that back to be recognized in safely remove hardware?

 

[Yami]

Is the drive set for quick removal or for performance? If the former, then I believe (in XP, at least), that the drive will not show up as it doesn't need to be Safely Removed.

 

[Nubbleet]

It is set up for quick removal. But it is also set up the same way on my other computer which shows it under safely remove hardware. I even tried setting to performance and it still did not show up. I don't like to remove without the safely remove hardware, because I am afraid of losing data.

It also doesn't recognize my flash drive. Could it be that the Safely Remove Hardware is not recognizing USB Mass Storage Devices?

 

[KSoD]

I would restart the PC and see if it shows up in the Safely Remove Hardware area then. If not you may have to check for chipset Driver updates, or could be a issue with Windows.

 

[Nubbleet]

I decided I would try a system restore to when it worked (a day ago) and it told me "Changes made to drive(s) E: after this point can not be reversed because the drive was either excluded from the system restore monitoring, or was turned off or removed." Does that mean that I made a change to the USB port? If so it did it itself.

But that fixed it for the first time I plugged it in, then it didn't show up after I removed it and plugged it back in again.

 

[KSoD]

Strange that the System Restore said that. Cause it shouldnt affect the USB like that. Is E:\ the drive letter for your system install?

 

[Nubbleet]

No, my XP is on C:, my optical drive is D:, and whenever I plug things in like a flash drive its always E:. I guess I can live with it, but is it safe to unplug the ext HDD without safely remove hardware when it's set up for quick removal?

 

[KSoD]

Next time you hook up the External, Go into the disk Management and assign it a different drive letter. Maybe there is a issue with that drive letter that is causing this.

I wouldnt just rip the plug. while they may be hot swapable, could still cause data corruption. Happened to me a couple of times.

 

[Nubbleet]

I tried changing the drive letter. No luck.

 

[KSoD]

Well from what i am reading on this page here from Microsoft:

Click Optimize for quick removal to disable write caching on the storage device and in Windows. This allows you to remove the device without using the Safely Remove Hardware application, but it can have an impact on the performance of the device.

So you should be good to go with just removing the device without corruption.

Maybe check out some of these pages for results:

How to safely remove your USB drive when Safely Remove Hardware icon disappears from the system tray
Safely Remove Hardware

Maybe they will give some inside info for you.