Safely Remove Hardware Problem

my usb printer is listed in "safely remove hardware ", along with my usb card readers.

 

Pete

When I use the SRH function and it shuts down my entire card reader, the icon in the tray is no longer there. It will return at reboot.

Daniel

 

Zander wrote:

• "Can't imagine why Jim's external wouldn't act the same as mine though. "

It does. My apologies ... I was away from my desktop computer when I made that statement yesterday, and was relying on my somewhat less than perfect memory. I just tried it again, and it works exactly as you suggest.

Pete wrote:

• " Not so - the icon remains in the tray as long as the removable drive is plugged in. "

Sorry, Pete ... to qualify your statement, "Not necessarily so ". If the device is removed from the system via the systray icon, the icon will disappear when the device is unplugged or when the pop-up message saying it is safe to remove the device is closed even if the device is still plugged in.

 

In addition to the card reader, I have two USB printers and a USB digicam on the system. The card reader is the only one that appears on the Safely Remove Hardware list.

 

Pete: HP7700 series.

More interesting: the only USB devices listed are the printer and the card readers. I have several other USB devices, scanner, web cam, cd tower, etc. not listed. Wonder why the difference.

Dan: I still think Windows is waiting for the device to be unplugged.

Martin

 

Just as information;

I have three USB devices that are not listed in SRH, two HP printers [deskjet 842c and laserjet 1000] and a Visioneer 8100 scanner.

Daniel

 

Martin

You may be correct that windows is waiting for the divice to be unplugged. However, this makes the SRH useless with a built in card reader that so many machines have now.

It also seems strange that Microsoft would design this function for the device to be unplugged rather than sensing that a card has been removed and leaving the device active.

Perhaps this is a carryover from the time when they would have assumed that the only thing being used this way would be something plugged into the front of the computer.

Daniel

 

Sometimes in the morning you have to get your brain in gear and for me that takes a while.

It just dawned on me: My HP printer has a built in card reader. So, along with everybody else, the only things listed are the flash drives.

But I have never used "Safely Remove Hardware" just to remove the flash card. When I'm done, I just pull it out. Never had a problem.

Except once when I used Windows to format a compact flash card, when put back in the camera, the camera could not read or write to it.

Martin

 

Pete

I do have the latest USB drivers, as far as I know. I have only had this computer about two weeks and I got the latest drivers available at that time.

I was not aware of a MS USB 'patch'. What is it supposed to do?

Daniel

 

Availability of the Windows XP SP1 USB 1.1 and 2.0 Update

 

Martin wrote:

• "Except once when I used Windows to format a compact flash card, when put back in the camera, the camera could not read or write to it. "

That's because they use different formats, as I learned when I did exactly the same thing ... the camera was unable to read or write to it until I re-formatted it in the camera.

The closest analogy I can think of is the recently much maligned (on this BBS) floppy disk, which was in wide use on numerous computer platforms ten years ago. PCs, Macs, Amigas, and others, all used the same floppy disk, usually pre-formatted to 720 KB for the PC (this was before today's standard 1440 KB). To use them in the other computers, they had to be re-formatted ... by the Mac to 800 KB, and by the Amiga to 880 KB. Same disk, different formats, none readable by any of the others.

 

Jim's right about the format. My camera manual specifically said not to use lyour computer to format the card. I had a look at the format on one of mine and it's fat. Windows can read from and write to a fat formatted disk but I would be willing to bet that if you format the drive with windows, it'll get formatted with fat16 instead of fat. I would imagine the camera doesn't understand the fat16 format.