Right Click Context Menu - Eject USB Device?

[not so gray matter]

EDITED: Original Question: How can I add the eject/safely remove choice back into the explorer context menu?

New Question:
Ok well now I want to ask a different question. Does anyone know how to properly edit the registry to add such a key. When I'm in the devices & printers window the option is available via right click. Therefore, I searched for eject in the registry and found an entry in the shell section of DeviceDisplayObject which is the controller (I hope) for that Devices & Printers window. I'm assuming this is the correct key.

It's located at:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\DeviceDisplayObject\AllItems\Shell\Windows.Eject

Now I've attempted to copy that and move it to places such as the global context menu area (ROOT\*\Shell\) and (ROOT\Drive\shell\). However, no matter where I add it it won't work. Maybe something in the shellex line below it is required as well, I don't know. Maybe I'm just cloning it wrong.

If anyone has experience give it a try.

NOTE: I don't want to open the menu for ejecting a disk, I want the right click item to actually eject the disk. Also, I know how to create a shortcut to open the ejection menu.

 

[Night Hawk]

I used to unplug an external drive in Vista without the need to click on the safely remove icon. In 7 the prompting for missing device will be seen when not doing that for a flash drive however.

With or without clicking on the green icon in the system tray the drive letter to certain flash drives will still be maintained. If the brand like San Disk sees an automatic appearance when first plugged in with a small screen with the brand name on it then you click the safely remove option to stop the prompting.

 

[whs]

The way I understood it: Eject was for the card reader because on some system you cut the reader power off if you used "safely remove". For USB sticks and disks you were supposed to use "safely remove" which indeed was part of the Vista right click context menu. That would make sure that all data buffers were written to the device.
But you are right, in Win7 you have "Eject" for the cards, but no "Safely Remove" for the others. For that you have to go to the icon in the tray.

 

[not so gray matter]

Whether it's called "Eject" or "Safely Remove", it'd be nice if I could add it to my context menu.

I want it there because once a HDD is ejected, it'll enter low power mode, then if I want to reconnect it, I can just fiddle with the usb plug. Granted I could always use the safely remove systray icon, but it's not as convenient for me.

BTW, My external HDDs don't enter low power mode when connected, or if they do they get interuppted and spin back up, it's much more reliable when the OS thinks they're disconnected.

 

[whs]

I used to unplug an external drive in Vista without the need to click on the safely remove icon. In 7 the prompting for missing device will be seen when not doing that for a flash drive however.

With or without clicking on the green icon in the system tray the drive letter to certain flash drives will still be maintained. If the brand like San Disk sees an automatic appearance when first plugged in with a small screen with the brand name on it then you click the safely remove option to stop the prompting.

Your approach is only halfway safe if you did not enable write caching (which I guess most people would do because of the performance gain). With write caching on, you could lose data.

 

[Night Hawk]

At the time I simply plugged the drive in and upnplugged when first getting it to solve the XP detection problem while it still had the factory Fat volume on. That was a few times originally subsequently leaving it plugged in once reformatted until 7 came along!

Now it's no longer in the case but waiting to go back into the external casing or find another home. But write caching wasn't involved there. With the flash drives now being used the sys tray icon is simply clicked for the eject option.

The little green icon is still the same in 7 and should be used as a regualr habit to solve all problems with the external drives. Without any drive or device plugged in however the icon is not seen until you plug one in which I did to see that reappear.

 

[not so gray matter]

One of my problems with the safely eject systray icon is that when I have mutiple devices connected and eject one, I have to actually power the device down in order to eject another. In other words, I can't eject to low power mode and then fiddle with the connection to re-engage as I usually do. It's too bad that their isn't an application (atleast that I know of) that handles devices like Disk Utility on the MAC.

For those who don't know, disk utility allows you to mount and unmount partitions of external hard drives without affecting partitions on the same disk. OS X automatically mounts all partitions on a disk when it's initially connected, but with disk utility you can unmount 1 partition while keeping the other mounted and/or unmount all partitions and then mount them again 30 minutes later without having to cycle the power in the device.

 

[not so gray matter]

Ok well now I want to ask a different question. Does anyone know how to properly edit the registry to add such a key. When I'm in the devices & printers window the option is available via right click. Therefore, I searched for eject in the registry and found an entry in the shell section of Device... I'm assuming this is the correct key.

It's located at:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\DeviceDisplayObject\AllItems\Shell\Windows.Eject

Now I've attempted to clone that and move it to places such as the global context menu area (ROOT\*\Shell\) and (ROOT\Drive\shell\. However, no matter where I add it it won't work. Maybe something in the shellex line below it is required as well, I don't know. Maybe I'm just cloning it wrong.

If anyone has experience give it a try.

 

[Bill2]

notsograymatter,

If you are looking for this thing for convenience, you can create a shortcut to eject the usb using USB Disk Ejector tool.

Create a Shortcut to Immediately Eject a Specific USB Drive in Windows 7

 

[not so gray matter]

notsograymatter,

If you are looking for this thing for convenience, you can create a shortcut to eject the usb using USB Disk Ejector tool.

Create a Shortcut to Immediately Eject a Specific USB Drive in Windows 7

Yeah I know how to do that, I want the Eject/Safely remove item in the context menu because it's item specific. I can right click > eject a specific drive. The shortcut isn't any better than the stock systray icon

BTW: You don't need to download an external program to do that, you can just use the line:

C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll​

 

[Night Hawk]

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.

 

[not so gray matter]

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.

 

[Brink]

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.

 

[not so gray matter]

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.

View attachment 68173

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.)

 

[Brink]

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 so gray matter]

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.

 

[Night Hawk]

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.

 

[not so gray matter]

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.

 

[Night Hawk]

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.

 

[not so gray 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.