Safely remove USB key drive? 1

[BaudKarma]

I've got one of those USB key drives. Win XP wants me to open up the "safely remove hardware" box and stop the drive in XP before I disconnect it, which is a PITA.

I can see where there might be a problem if I pull the drive out while it's being accessed, but will anything scary bad happen if its not being actively used and I just rip it out?

I try not to let my ignorance prevent me from offering a strong opinion.

 

[garebo]

Okay.
Im not looking to cause trouble here. Its just that this issue affects me greatly as i use a lot of usb and firewire products, mostly all hard drives, and i run into the problem of a drive not wanting to "unhook" itself from the system so i can turn it off. Therefore i have been following this and looking for any possible info. I tend to believe people like cdogg, paparazzi, bcastner, etc, since these people know a lot more than i do. So because i pointed this out its not because i am looking to start a dogfight or anything like that, just looking for the facts.
I am gonna try and google this info if i can.





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[garebo]

I googled and came up with this to start with:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prdh_dmt_cgwi.asp

I havent read it all but it appears from what microsoft says that temporello and Tony57 are possibly correct.


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[garebo]

I just checked the drive i have been having trouble with. Its a firewire box with a 60 gig maxtor drive in it and its already set to "optimize for quick removal".
So i guess i will still have to struggle with it anyway.


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[dpcatkins]

What's the point in having USB stuff if you have to safley remove them in the system tray. I've been using USB stuff for a long time and i've never safley undocked them, i've never lost any information on any of the stuff. I've got a 500Gb hard drive with 200Gb worth of data and i've never lost any data.

 

[G0AOZ]

Lucky old you! Go and read Micker377's excellent post near the top of this thread...

I guess if you leave it long enough for "write behind" to finish, then you can probably get away with pulling the drive out without losing or corrupting your data.

For the sake of a few keystrokes, it's not a chance I'm prepared to take...

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[gravesg]

Well, I am one of the unlucky ones - in a hurry, I removed my USB drive without using the “Safely Remove Hardware” and the drive no longer works. I am using Windows XP Pro, it recognizes the drive but I am unable to read the data. I don’t need the data and I cannot format the drive. Any suggestions??

 

[garebo]

You should be able to get it to work again.
How did you try to reformat the drive? From win xp disk management? If that doesnt work then try a win 98 boot disk and format from dos. It may or may not work that way but worth a try.
If the drive is not a usb flash drive and its in an external case then you can take it out and slave it to a pc and either format it using a win 98 boot disk or win xp disk management.




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[gravesg]

Tried context menu originally. Now I tried Disk Mgmt. I don't have Win 98 boot disk. It is a USB Flash Drive. Any additional suggestions are appreciated.

 

[garebo]

You should be able to get your hands on the files needed to put on a floppy so that you will have a win98 boot disk. Either from a pc that is running win98 or win98se, or even using google.
I could send them to you using usendit.com



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[gravesg]

Tried it with win98 - no luck. I did notice that in disk mgmt is show it as 496 however under properties it shows 0!! Thanks again for you help

 

[garebo]

Did you try fdisk?
What messages did you get?
In fdisk, did you click on where is says something like "list info on this drive"
If you had more than one hard drive connected and in fdisk did you click on "change drive".
sorry, have to ask.

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[pmonett]

I must say that I used to have a functional 512MB USB drive. I would slot it in and take it out without a care in the world. Safely remove ? What on Earth for ?

The drive lasted all of six weeks.

Now I have a Memorex 1GB USB thumb drive. I slot it in, and I Safely Remove it when I'm finished with it. It has been working for over four months.

You do whatever you want. I'll keep on using Safe Remove.

Pascal.

 

[BaudKarma]

I don't believe you'll have much luck trying a Win98 boot disk to fix your USB drive. The USB drivers are only loaded when you start Win98 itself, they're not part of the DOS boot disk package. Also, for future reference, you can download a variety of boot disk images at

http://www.bootdisk.com

I think I'm going to try "Safely Remove" whenever I've been writing data to my thumb drive, and I'll just rip it out if all I've been doing is reading data. More updates as events warrant....

I try not to let my ignorance prevent me from offering a strong opinion.

 

[garebo]

Baudkarma, you may want to read this thread:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1127617

Some mobos\bios work together and allow just that, that is, access to usb drives. I believe my MSI NEO2 must as well as i believe i have done the same.



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[BaudKarma]

Ahhhh... I probably should have figured that, seeing as my new mobo detects my USB Keyboard at bootup. Something to tuck away for future reference. Thanks for the correction, garebo!

I try not to let my ignorance prevent me from offering a strong opinion.

 

[garebo]

You're welcome. My guess has been that it seems to be some sort of connection between the bios and the motherboard chipset, leaning toward the motherboard chipset. But you do have to go into bios and enable support for usb keyboards and also for legacy usb support.
Plus, as you can see in the dialogue, its still in the argument stage here, lol.


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