Include this in the big list-o-reasons why I end up getting out of the house later than I like!
I went to "Safely Remove" my USB HDD this morning, and whoa... the tray icon is gone! hmmm... so I open up Computer Managment Console and rat around but can't find anything EXACTLY like that.
I thought about rebooting to see if I got it back, but the box rebooted during the night for some reason... probably an update... and it didn't come back after that, so I figured what they heck, I can probably find out how to do this faster than a reboot... I'm a trained professional after all!
Since I had already exhausted finding anything that looked like "Safely Remove" or "Eject", I tried "Uninstall" on the USB drive. That seemed to work... took it out of the list of drives, but the light was still on, and this device normally turns the light off when it's ready to go, so now what?
Google to the rescue as usual. I found instructions on this site, and I will repeat them here, but wanted to give credit :) ... and the reason I'm re-listing this here is it took me much longer than a reboot to find this, so I figured what the heck, another link in the interweb couldn't hurt.
What you want to do is run this:
"%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll"
No idea if this works on anything other than XP Pro, but what I did was navigate to C:\Windows\system32, made sure rundll32.exe was actually in that folder, then opened a command prompt in that folder and ran:
"rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll"
directly from there just to make sure. Either way should work. In the link I quoted above, George Barrowcliff suggests making a shortcut for this on your desktop. I think I'll make one and put it in a folder along witht he replacement showdesktop one I did 2 weeks ago for when things go a little weird.
Oh... and yes it not only worked, but after it finished shutting down my drive, it kindly left an icon in my system tray!
Stay in the 'Light!
posted @ Thursday, September 11, 2008 9:39 AM