usb hard drive driver?  

Hello and welcome babavuna first up can you please do this
Now before we can help we do need to know what is in your machine so please do this System Info - See Your System Specs
or either enter the specs of your system in your forum profile the specs will appear when we click on that little box bottom left of the post screen it is for me the preferable option as it is easy. As you may appreciate it is very hard when you don’t know what one is working with for example a diesel or petrol engine.
*(pretyped to save time)

Now I think maybe you need to update the driver for the USB ports and the external drive should have installed it's driver when you first plugged it in so did it? However before we can go on we nee to know what your specs are.

Just a thought have you tried disconnecting the drive to cut off the power to it?? and then reconnect it??

I don`t think you`ll have any issues unplugging the drive after you get the safe to remove message.

It would be no different then if the drive went to sleep inside the PC case.

babavuna, I think you're on to something; a few times I too have had a device that really did not "feel" safe to remove. I have had to leave the device attached until I was finished with the computer and did a shutdown, or, if I needed that usb port, I had to do a restart, waited for the famous black screen, and pulled the device off of the port. Have you been doing that also?

Would you mind trying something? tweaking.com's Windows Repair (All in One), Safe Mode with Networking, unclick all prechecked, click only file associations for EXE and system files, items number 26 & 27; restart twice, letting Windows come to full desktop, letting Windows re-settle. I think leave external media devices offline until the 2nd restart phase.
Items 26 & 27 are supposed to be resetting Windows' defaults.

RolandJS said:

babavuna, I think you're on to something; a few times I too have had a device that really did not "feel" safe to remove. I have had to leave the device attached until I was finished with the computer and did a shutdown, or, if I needed that usb port, I had to do a restart, waited for the famous black screen, and pulled the device off of the port. Have you been doing that also?

But wouldn`t the external drive still be running even if you turned the PC off ?

And if it just used the usb cable for power, wouldn`t shutting down the PC be just the same as pulling the plug from the external drive if it used AC power ?

Don`t these externals have an on/off switch on them ?

Hi,
Yes most external hdd enclosures do have a manual power switch to totally turn them off or at least both mine do
Amazon.com: Sabrent ECS-STU35K USB 2.0 to 3.5-inch IDE/SATA or Serial ATA Aluminum Hard Drive Enclosure Case (BLACK): Electronics

Amazon.com: Hornettek Enterprise 3.5in 4 Bay USB 3.0 JBOD SATA HDD Enclosure(HT-3402U3): Computers & Accessories

I do not use safe to remove on these items
I just shutdown the computer down the data on them is too important to take a chance of corruption :)
Only flash drives I use str.