usb hd not recognized as removable

I have a Maxtor external hd which I connect to my Dell XPS 9000 running Windows 7 home premium thru usb. It worked as expected but last night when w7 started up (the external hd was connected at the time) it asked me if I wanted to scan and repair the hd. I said "scan, but don't to fix anything". So it did the scanning and found no problems. And I could access the HD fine. But, being such a nice computer user, I tried as usual to do "safe removal" of the HD before disconnecting the thing. First I tried right clicking on the drive's icon in My computer but the menu did not have an "Eject" option. Next I ran "control hotplug.dll" and saw the Maxtor HD listed. I clicked on the "Disconnect" button (or something like that - you see, I actually a Chinese version w7) but I was told "nope, you cannot remove this device because it ain't a removable thing". I could see that in My computer the drive was identified as "local HD" (again, actually some Chinese to that effect).

So, did anyone have similar strange experience with an USB HD?

Jonathan_King said:

Welcompplie www7t2b,

I searched for your problem online, and I found something that may be applicable to you:

My Portable External Hard Drive is Now a Non-Portable Internal Hard Drive

Hope it helps,
~JK

That article was about someone turning his external HDs into internal ones (removing the enclosing etc). I am not about to do that (yet). But thanks for trying to help all the same.

are you using an RC or final version of windows 7? I started to have the same issue with an RC I was using with my old netbook. I still have the USB HDD but my current laptop doesn't have issues with it.

macgyver2 said:

are you using an RC or final version of windows 7? I started to have the same issue with an RC I was using with my old netbook. I still have the USB HDD but my current laptop doesn't have issues with it.

I'd guess it has to be a final version because Dell preinstalled it for me (the whole PC is from Dell, after all).

I am going to try again tonight to see if I will have the luck of the problem going away quietly.

I've found a workaround. I right-clicked on the icon that represented my usb HDD in Devices and Printers (I am not sure of the wordings because I've the Chinese version of w7), and I saw an option that says "Eject"; when I chose that option, a message saying it was safe to remove the device appeared. There's a little problem here: the icon does not tell you the corresponding drive letter. I can image if one has more than one device of the exact same type, it will take some figuring to tell which is which. In My Computers, where drive letters were shown, the context menu of the same drive did not have this Eject option.

Thanks for posting the workaround and for the "control hotplug.dll" tip.
Also applicable as "rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll".
Thank to Brink for the second method which was described at Safely Remove Hardware Shortcut - Create

I was about to give up on this. I have an external HDD that connects to the computer by USB. Every time I try to disconnect the thing, I'm told the device is busy. I end up unplygging the darn thing. Explorer then goes bananas, and eats up system ram until something crashes. I've searched around for a while on the web, and most points to hardware or partition issues.

What finally fixed things for me was this little thing: HotSwap!.

Hotswap looks like the oldschool remove device thingy from XP. But beware, this thing can unmount any disk on the system beyond where the running OS is installed.