Windows: To safely remove USB drives and memory cards from Windows, you have to mouse over to the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media icon in the taskbar. USB Disk Ejector will do the same thing, but with a quick keyboard shortcut.
USB Disk Ejector is a portable program that runs in the taskbar and lets you set hotkeys to safely eject removable drives. It supports ejection by drive label, drive letter, drive name, and mount point. If you regularly use more than one drive at a time, USB Disk Ejector supports multiple hotkeys, too. Even if you don’t use the hotkeys, USB Disk Ejector’s list of drives is larger than the one built into Windows, so it’s easier to see and eject.
USB Disk Ejector is free, open source software and works on all versions of Windows from XP on up.
USB Disk Ejector [Quick And Easy Software via AddictiveTips]
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10 responses to “USB Disk Ejector Safely Ejects USB Drives With A Hotkey”
ejecting USB has NEVER worked for me in Win8 – is it meant to?
Who has needed to eject since xp? As long as you don’t tell it to start writing a file and then yank it out before it’s finished writing you’d be fine.
The last time I ever ejected a usb drive was probably a decade ago with XP and that would have been with an NTFS formatted external hard drive.
I have never ejected a USB and I’ve never had a problem.
Is properly ejecting a USB one of those “better safe than sorry” warnings like not using your mobile phone on a plane or at the fuel pump? I’d genuinely like to know why this is still considered an issue (ie article idea for the editors).
From experience if you are copying a file to your USB drive wait 10 seconds after it has finished copying before yanking it from your computer. I have had windows 7 tell me it has finished copying but i can still see the data transfer light on the drive active and if i remove the drive the file is corrupt.
If you put it on the USB flash drive, you’re using and run it, wouldn’t it refuse to eject the drive that you’re running it from?
It’s not just file caching that you have to worry about.
Whenever I use Safely Eject and it won’t it’s because some program has a file open on the drive.
If you use Sysinternals, Process Explorer run as Administrator, Find, Find handle or dll, drive letter of un-ejectable drive you will be able to find out which program or process has a lock on a file.
You have to run as Admin because many times it is a system process that is the culprit.
If you remove the drive without shutting down the offending program you may corrupt the file or drive.