Windows 7: Would you reccomend applying MS KB article for powering down USB Ports

Hi again people!!!

After finally replacing my old PSU I can use my external HDD in both my laptop and destop machines, but, since a time ago, I notice that XP is able to power down devices you safely remove, but Windows 7 is not... and everytime I use Windows 7 with my external, I gotta unplug the cable (just of course after safely removing) with the power still going through the HDD... and it sounds weirdly when doing so...

Sometimes windows will tell the disk has errors even if I safely removed the hardware and I guess it's because of this, however, the disk is not damaged (fortunately).

Looking for solutions I found this KB article from microsoft: USB Port Remains Active for Disabled or Safely Removed USB Device

They say this behaviour is intenden on Windows 7 and even Vista, but I really fear that the HD can be fisically damaged if I cannot get it to spin down before fisical removal...

The question here, is, would you reccomend to apply this fix? will I have problems if doing so? Anyone has tested this and used this fix?

Thanks in advance for your help and answers.



See ya!!

If Windows is reporting drive errors the fast solution would be running the Check Disk tool. You can see that scheduled to run in two ways rather then disable the usb bus.
1) Right click on the drive's icon in Windows Explorer to bring up the properties screen and open the Tools tab. Click on the Check now button und error checking.
2) Open up a command prompt and type in "chkdsk /r" which will then see the "disk check scheduled for next startup" confirmation.

This will repair basic file system errors. If you ran a diagnostics tool and no hardware errors were found like bad sectors this should clean up the rest while it may take a several minutes on the next startup.

Thanks for the answer

Already did, no errors found, even ran HDD Regenerator (I'm a complete paranoid XD) and no bad sectors found... but, everytime I eject the HDD using safe removal, the disk keeps spinning, and sometimes when plugged back brings the dialog with the options to check the disk for errors, In XP this doesn't happen O_o...

Would you reccomend applying the fix from microsoft?

When you disable the usb bus entirely forget the use of any usb mouse and/or keyboard as well. You would only use the "Per Device Setting" method not the Global method with the registry edit seen in the article. That part is specific to one device only like the external drive.

Well, I was forced to use the global setting, as using the "Per device" method did nothing XD... testes with the correc ID and everything... but didn't do, just the global :P

By now, my USB mouse works nicely, and now the HDD spins down whenever is safely removed, I hope I don't receive more errors after this :P

Weird case in here XD...

Thanks for the help.

See ya!!

Well at least you gave it a try to see which would work out for you. Glad the Global option did solve it for you.

Here I have to use the high performance options in the power plan but haven't run into too many problems with usb drives and devices except a stubborn printer or two! Had a few times when it wouldn't stop the flash drive in at the time where I simply unplugged it anyways. After a restart the problem simply disappeared though.