"Safely Eject Hardware" Not Working

[Dom]

Hi all,

Got a hinky problem with my PC. It's only a minor thing but it's bugging me.

Basically, whenever I plug in my USB memory stick into my PC, it seems to take rather a long time to pop up with the options box that allows you to select what you want to do. It also takes ages to copy files to and from it, which it never used to do.

But the main problem is that whenever I click the icon in the system tray to "safely remove hardware", although the USB stick appears in the list, it never confirms that it's "safe to remove" it once I select it to be removed.

Any ideas why?

I'm not sure if it's the USB stick or my PC to be honest. On the one hand, I actually reformatted the USB stick to make it NTFS (whereas previously it was FAT32) but on the other hand, if I plug the USB stick into my media player and then do the equivalent "safely eject hardware" thing, it too doesn't ever confirm that it's safe to take the stick out again.

That leads me to believe that it's the USB stick that's gone funny, but I also reformatted my PC a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't have the USB 3.0 drivers installed (which it now has).

So does anyone know how i can fix this? It's really annoying, and I don't want to just take the USB stick out without Windows telling me it can be removed, on the off-chance that Windows is reading/writing to it.

Thanks all.

[Steve Lampkins]

USB sticks can be a real bugger. See what happens if you open My computer - Win+E, and right click on the drive, and select Eject.

[Dom]

I'll give that a go tonight, ta.

One thing I forgot to mention though - after I've selected to remove the USB stick, I can no longer open the list of removable hardware until I actually pull out the USB stick physically. There are still a couple of SATA drives that are "removable", so a list should appear, but it doesn't.

I've also noticed the same thing happening when I plug in my Android phone and "mount as USB storage", come to think of it.