I’ve googled this topic extensively and haven’t had a lot of luck finding an answer. Short story, there seems to be no option to eject or stop a USB hard drive in Windows 7. I have such options for USB flash drives and for optical drives, though that’s a different sort of eject, but I don’t have these same options for USB hard drives. I’ve found a lot of online references for how to restore missing eject icons from the task bar and for how to load the stop/eject window from the run command but none of these seem to help. If I manage to get the window open, none of my USB hard drives show up as items in the list, so I still can’t stop the drives before disconnecting.
I was always told that you should always eject a drive before disconnecting it. Is this no longer the case? If this still holds true, any idea how I might go about it?
As soon as I plug in one of my WD externals an icon appears in the task bar for removing the drive or drives. it sounds like it may be a Window issue. Try going into the Device Manager find the drive select properties then Policies and set to Better preformance.
I had a feeling someone was going to suggest this. I saw this in one of the many, many links I checked out from my googling expedition. No luck. When I select drive properties from device manager for the drives in question, I have no Policies tab to select.
Strange huh? Any ideas?
It seems like I read somewhere else the, as unlikely as it seems, having out-of-date firmware will result in missing Policies tabs from the drive properties windows. I’ll give updating the drive firmware a try and see if that helps. If it does, I’ll post back here.
Well, I’ve confirmed that I currently have the most recent firmware on my drive and I have no eject options for my drive. If anyone has any ideas, I’m open.
