Safely remove hardware not working

Merlin5 · 3 Nov 2012 at 05:56

On my laptop, when I connect a hard drive via eSATA from my new enclosure, an intel rapid storage green tick icon appears in the taskbar. Hovering over it gives me 'Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media". but left or right clicking the icon does nothing, it doesn't respond at all and brings up no context menu. I updated to the latest intel rapid storage and it's still the same. Does anyone know why? To turn the connected HDD off I need to shutdown the laptop first if I can't get the eject to do anything while in windows.

On my desktop PC, I don't have intel rapid storage as it's AMD, so I use a program called hotswap which works. I suppose I could use that on the laptop?

Philtor · 3 Nov 2012 at 11:02

Does this just happen with the eSATA drive? What about a USB pen drive or USB HDD? Has it worked ok for you previously? If I remember correctly AHCI needs to be enabled in the BIOS to allow hot swapping of your eSATA drive.

Merlin5 · 3 Nov 2012 at 13:51

philtor said:
Does this just happen with the eSATA drive? What about a USB pen drive or USB HDD? Has it worked ok for you previously? If I remember correctly AHCI needs to be enabled in the BIOS to allow hot swapping of your eSATA drive.

Tbh, I've never noticed if the icon appears in the taskbar when I've inserted my pendrive, I'll have to check that later. Also, I've not used the USB socket yet on the enclosure, I'll have to try that out. I can tell you though that I checked the laptop BIOS last night, and eSATA is enabled, and so is AHCI. Also, before I realised I'm meant to 'eject' the drive, I turned the driive off at the enclosure switch and I noticed an intel rapid storage message came up on the taskbar. Can't remember what it said but something to the effect of the drive being disconnected. So rapid storage seems to be aware of my drive but just doesn't respond when I click on the taskbar icon. If I right click on any other applications icons in the taskbar though, their context menus appear.

Phil2008 · 3 Nov 2012 at 16:03

Yea thats a good idea from philtor, as your esata and internal sata will be able to run in separate modes, so just double check that the esata is in AHCI mode.