Safe Device Wipe is generally used to erase a USB flash drive or external hard drive in Windows 10, 8 and Windows 7, as well as in XP. It may happen that the safe delete icon has disappeared from the Windows taskbar, which can cause confusion and bewilderment, but it's not a big deal. Now we are going to put that icon on your site.
Note: In Windows 10 Y 8, for devices defined as multimedia devices, safe eject icon is not displayed (reproducers, Android tablets, some phones). You can disable them without using this feature. In addition, it should be noted that in Windows 10 the display of icons can also be deactivated in Settings – Personalization – Taskbar – “Select the icons displayed on the taskbar”.
Regularly, to safely remove the device in Windows, you right click on the respective icon near the clock and you do it. The purpose of “Safely remove” is that when you use it, tells the operating system that you intend to remove that device (like a flash drive). In response, Windows closes any operation that could corrupt the data. In some cases, also stops supplying power to the device.
Failure to use safe device removal can lead to data loss or drive damage. In practice, this doesn't happen often and there are certain things to pay attention to and consider, see: When to use safe removal hardware.
How to Safely Eject USB Flash Drives and Other USB Devices Automatically
Microsoft offers its own official utility “Automatic USB Troubleshooting” to fix exactly the type of problem specified in Windows 10, 8.1 and Windows 7. The order of use is as follows:
- Run the downloaded utility and click “Next”.
- If required, check the devices for which safe delete does not work (even though the answer will apply to the system as a whole).
- Wait for the operation to finish.
- If everything was done correctly, flash drive, the external drive or other USB device will be ejected and the icon will appear in the future.
curiously, the same utility, even when it does not report it, it also fixes the permanent display of the safe device removal icon in the Windows notification area 10 (which usually appears even when nothing is connected). You can download the USB Device Self-Test Utility from the Microsoft web portal: https://download.microsoft.com/download/D/B/B/DBBF8048-0817-40DC-817D-395652B870FF/WinUSB.diagcab.
How to return the icon “Safely wipe device”
Sometimes, for unknown reasons, the safe eject icon may disappear. Even if you plug and unplug the flash drive over and over again, the icon does not appear for some reason. If it also happens to you (and most likely, opposite case, I will not be here), presione Win + R on your keyboard and type the following command in the window “Run”:
RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
This command works on Windows 10, 8, 7 and XP. The lack of a space after the comma is not an error, Should be. After running this command, the dialog box will open “Safely remove device”, what was i looking for.
In this window you can, as usual, choose the device you want to disconnect and click on the button “Stop”. a “secondary effect” of this command is that the safe eject icon reappears where it should.
If it keeps going away and you need to run the specified command each time to remove the device, you can create a shortcut for this action: right-click on an empty area of the desktop, select “To create” – “Direct access” and in the field “Object location”, enter the command to invoke the Safely Remove Device dialog. In the second step of creating a shortcut, you can give it whatever name you want.
Another way to safely erase a device in Windows
There is another easy way to take advantage of safe device wipe when there is no icon on the Windows taskbar:
- In “My PC”, right click on the connected device, click on “Properties”, open the tab “Hardware” and select the desired device. Click on “Properties” Y, in the window that opens, click on “Change settings”.
- In the next dialog, open the tab “Politics” and there you will find the link “Safely wipe device”, which you can use to execute the desired function.
This concludes the instructions. Hopefully, the alternatives to safely remove a removable hard drive or flash drive listed here will suffice.
