I looked at one of the other guides there for ejecting the optical disk where you need two shortcuts each with a command added like cdrom open and then the specific drive letter.
Yeah the whole point is to have one context menu item that ejects whatever drive you're right clicking.
If you want to see what I'm talking about, hook up an external drive and right click it in explorer, then right click it in Devices & Printers.
The best I've been able to come up w/ is the hotplug.dll shortcut, and shortcuts to the specific device in that D&P menu.
Shortcuts to the specific item in the D&P menu allow you to right click to eject but can't be placed in many places and actually work.
I'm completely certain there's a way to do it, I just don't know what the actual codes are and where to place them.
The codes are probably located in that registry slot I mentioned in the first post, not sure at all where to place them.
I've noticed that in the Computer window, that you will have the Eject context menu item for all listed Devices with Removable Storage. Any shortcuts that you create with these Devices with Removable Storage (drives) will also have eject in their context menu as well.
That's the thing, my external hard drives show up as regular hard drives. I think removable storage refers to flash cards and the like, atleast in the context of Windows 7. I'm pretty certain that my computer sees my external hard drives as SATA II drives connected via USB which in the computer's altered mind makes them not removable.
On the flip side, since I can get shortcuts from the Devices & Printers menu to hold the eject option is there anyway to place them in the main computer explorer window. (The one in your attachment.)
Do you have the latest chipset drivers installed for your motherboard?
There's no way to add Devices & Printers in the Computer window, but you could "Pin to taskbar" this Devices and Printers shortcut to make opening it easier when you want to eject one of the drives. It's a pretty good workaround.
Not sure if I have the latest chipset drivers, I don't usually worry about it because bootcamp installs them anyway. I'll check the NVIDIA website.
As a stopgap I'm just going to download a key mapper and map my pagedown key to the hotplug dll.
EDIT: Updating to latest drivers for nForce 730i. Not sure what the suggestion was supposed to change, but I haven't seen anything major.
Last edited by not so gray matter; 19 Apr 2010 at 15:47.
When still having the WD MyBook Essentials together before removing the drive for internal use I would unplug the drive while either XP or Vista was running at the time without the need to click the safely remove. While having it from internal use having replaced a 500gb with a 1tb Green Power model same drive series I have elected to reinstall that internally once 3 of the 5 HDs are moved into a new build.
That rules out trying this on the retail 7 unfortunately while still having it in the external casing when the 7 betas were first available. Wnen plugging it in while booted in either of the two previous versions the new hardware popup would be seen as Windows installed it. In most cases you leave an external HD left plugged in and may have a drive letter assigned by you directly.
Flash drives on the other hand are made to be bootable devices and are often seen differently by Windows. Plus you may the manufacturer's preprogrammed information stored on a chip in the device itself for the brand logo and telling Windows "I'm here!" and why the safely remove then becomes a neccesity in most cases.
Safely remove isn't a necessity for all of my drives, but it is for a few that have write caching enabled. That's the entire reason why I want the feature back. I've attempted to bind a key to the hotplug.dll but for some reason that isn't working properly. I guess I'll have to either go w/ the stock function or the program.
I never had caching set when plugging the drive in at the time when still in the external casing. For the most past however it ended up remaining plugged in steadily until the betas were available and the additional drive was then the idea behind installing it internally.
Note the WD Green Power series as well as other brand external HDs are not suitable for OSing resulting in lengthy problems with the programs you install. The larger 1tb GP drives one also being removed from the casing for internal remain storage devices only for that reason. The Caviar Blue or Black edition drive if not RE enterprise however are OS suited.
The flash drive is the item now used for plugging and unplugging where the green colored sys tray icon is the thing you still need to click. Even with the notification area hidden from view that's still right there as always. I tend to believe we are both stuck using it no matter.
Yeah I've got all LaCie drives. Three of them. One's a Samsung Spinpoint 1TB, another is a 750gb something or other, doesn't have a model # on device manager. The last was labeled 320GB by LaCie but either they or Seagate screwed up cause it's a 360GB Seagate Barracuda. I have a couple other drives, but those are just older 2.5" Internal PATA drives from my old laptop that I switch between an enclosure. I use the LaCies for everything from booting to backups and storage. They've performed quite admirably so far.
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