safely remove hardware button missing? - Tech Support Forums

ShuckyD · November 26th, 2005, 03:21 PM

hey i just noticed on my main computer that the little icon down near the clock that has a green arrow on it or whatever that lets you select what you want to disable power to and remove it, its always up since i have SATA harddrives, is gone

... i rebooted thinking that mayeb since it was running for awhile they just "disappeared" thats like XP's trademark

... aftre i rebooted it still didnt come bakc and now that i need to use my "jump drive" i dont want to keep putting it in and removing it w/o disabling it first.

Does anyone know where in windows i can set that icon to display again?

thanks
J.D.

Kimbo · November 26th, 2005, 04:13 PM

Maybe it is hidden. Check by right-clicking the notification (systray) area and selecting Customize Notifications. See if the Safely Remove Hardware icon is being hidden, or maybe try restoring Defaults.

Just a thought...

ShuckyD · November 26th, 2005, 04:40 PM

i keep that hide inactive icon thing off as well as the grouping because they annoy the heck out of me, so i know it cant be that

kendy · December 2nd, 2005, 05:27 PM

i used to have the same problem on my laptop, right after i bought it from dell, with their installation on, and after i formatted the hdd and re-installed windows, it worked ok. i have reinstalled many times since then but never had the same problem again, so i don't actually know what caused it...

edit: just to be clear, before i reinstalled, whether i selected for the icon to be shown or hidden, it didn't make any difference, it just wasn't there...

ShuckyD · December 3rd, 2005, 03:00 AM

where can you select it to be shown or not to be?

OuTpaTienT · December 3rd, 2005, 03:23 AM

Open up your RUN dialog box and paste this into it:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

rabidaardvark · December 3rd, 2005, 03:31 AM

As long as you aren't writing to it you can't lose info and it doesn't damage the actual hardware to pull it out at any time. Just to let you know.

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/gr...humbdrive.html
http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists...ry/035896.html
http://pcworld.about.com/magazine/2208p107id116572.htm
and on.

RetroEvolute · December 3rd, 2005, 04:06 AM

Yeah, it bothers me, but SATA harddrives are hotswappable, and therefore, it recognizes it as removable.

Nothing much you can REALLY do about it... Just hide... It's probably not worth messing around.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kendy

i used to have the same problem on my laptop, right after i bought it from dell, with their installation on, and after i formatted the hdd and re-installed windows, it worked ok. i have reinstalled many times since then but never had the same problem again, so i don't actually know what caused it...

edit: just to be clear, before i reinstalled, whether i selected for the icon to be shown or hidden, it didn't make any difference, it just wasn't there...

It won't show up if you don't have the sata driver installed (HDD still works fine from what I've learned) Haven't installed your Chipset drivers, perhaps?

Coopermack · September 25th, 2008, 11:03 AM

i had the same prob but also lost my volume icon. this is a single user pc with no login, if i log out then in again it fixes the problem. now i use the login screen with no password and have no probs

kopfjaeger · September 25th, 2008, 11:56 AM

This may seem like a silly question, but are any USB devices plugged in?

AFAIK, the Safely Remove Hardware icon is only on the Systray when there is a USB device plugged in. When all removable USB devices have been removed, the icon goes away, only to return once a USB device is once again plugged into the machine.

If on the other hand, you have a USB device plugged in and no icon, that is an oddity indeed.