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I have noticed that Windows 7 is not giving me the option to right-click and "eject" my new USB external hard drives.

I still can safely remove them by clicking on the corresponding icon on the icon tray.

I was wondering if:

  1. The option is missing because of an error or some undesired system change, and there is a way to get it back.
  2. If the option to eject drives depends on the type of drive, and there is a reason why some USB drives can be ejected while others can't.

Note for clarification: The drives are hard drives; i.e. magnetic storage drives with moving parts, not SSDs.

Amelio Vazquez-Reina
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2 Answers2

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There are two meanings to "eject", unfortunately:

  1. Physically remove the medium from the device. E.g. Eject the CD, floppy disk, etc.

  2. Write all cached data to the disk, flush all buffers, do all the housekeeping on the filesystem and make the disk inaccessible so no further writing is possible.

Meaning #1 is enabled in "My Computer" only for the disks/devices that are declared "removable" by their driver. Meaning #2 is enabled in the system tray icon for all devices that are on a hot-plug bus (e.g. USB).

Thus the difference. Your new disk declares itself "non-removable", but it is USB-connected.

You still need to eject flash media! It is true that if flash disk is NTFS-formatted, it is somewhat resilient to sudden disconnects, but most flash disks are FAT-formatted, and if you yank it before Windows had the chance to flush all cached data to the disk, you'll get a nasty surprise sooner than later: corrupted files.

haimg
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I had a similar issue recently - it was due to an old Acronis filter driver that didn't get uninstalled correctly. You can check the "Device Stack" property under the details of the drive. This is an example (normal) stack

In my case there was an additional entry there that I looked up, and discovered it was from Acronis, and so I ran their "full cleanup" utility (https://kb.acronis.com/aticleanup)

Mark Sowul
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