IDEA: customizable replacement for "safely remove hardware" icon

[mysteryman]

there was a similar request on this post but the person asked for a reason that was already fulfilled by the existing builtin tool.

the builtin tool (im sure your all familiar so i'll be brief) has a little green icon in the system tray; when single clicked, lists removable drives and when clicked, they will be "safely removed". It also has a double click window which imho is less useful and more prone to mistakes, so i dont care if it has this; but it could be added if the coder wants.

this tool for the most part works perfectly, for removable hard drives and flash drive sticks, which plug into usb, or firewire; it OFTEN works on sata hard drives, but this depends on drivers for the card/chipset in question. the reason it does NOT work right is this: (going on half speculation) the driver coding team, must impliment SOMETHING which allows windows to know that this device is allowed to be safely removed. before you jump on me saying that some sata controllers simply do not support hotswap, i must stop you right there, please continue reading.

i have a asus m2n32-sli deluxe motherboard. it comes with two onboard sata2 controllers, one with 6 ports internal, and one with one internal, and one external. the 6 port device runs on the nvidia chipset; the other runs a SiI 3132 chipset. both of these controllers DO support hotswap, which i have confirmed with the KB on their respective sites. however, the SiI site says this in their documentation

http://12.24.47.40/al/12/106/10744.htm (this url is linked from SiI site, confirm if you wish, siliconimage.com then support, knowledge base, it puts you on a page with 12.24.47.40 ... then search for "hot plug", the title is called "SATA: Hot Plugging Drives Under Windows 2000/XP"

This feature is not explicitly highlighted in our current drivers, but all SATA controllers from Silicon Image do support hot plug capability. To remove a drive from a powered up system, do the following:

    * Enter the Windows Device Manager (through Control Panel or right clicking on My Computer and going to Properties)
    * Go to Disk Drives and find the disk you want to remove
    * Right click on the desired disk drive and select Remove/Disable

this works, of course, but it is annoying to do all the time for my hotswap bay, which is hooked up to the SiI plug, the app i would love if somone coded, would either be able to detect all sata and removable drives, and correspoding drive letters, and when clicked, allow that procedure to be done

however i would much prefer if it was customizable (might be outside of scope of this site) to have a include only or exclude list so that i could say... list only usb drives, and the one sata2 port i use for hotswap... and not the other 6 ports as most of my drives are the same model, and its sometimes hard to differenciate between them

[lanux128]

justinpetro1, check out this post & see if it is of use to you..

[mysteryman]

The Removedrive tool listed on that site, appears to do what i want it to (although i have not yet tested it, will do soon) except only half way.

the options it accepts to select the drive are the "friendly name", "drive letter" and "mount point"

the first is far too broad, i purchase nearly identical hardware every upgrade... so most of my drives i use for hotswap, may at one point be identical to an existing non-swap drive

the second would ALMOST work... but i would not trust it to run without verifying drive letters are correct, however perhaps the snack could simply be a script/program that detects the drive it is run from, and gives a prompt to eject or remove it. however this is a half-way fix, because to link to it, i would probobly have 3-4 shortcuts, aswell as potentially having to update them or have them eject the wrong drive in the future due to letter swapping as described in the same link.

I do think it would work best as a simple taskbar icon with a context menu which lists drives based on a config file with bus number, target id, lun (essentially, what port it is plugged into), to be extra safe, perhaps a sanity check in config with volume label expected, or even you could do it with device serial number and there should be no duplicates, ofcourse the interface should show friendlyname/label/size/driveletter (or some of them) not the hard to identify serialnumber

[f0dder]

Just a side note: you probably won't be able to safely remove the drive that the tool resides on, due to how windows works (just like you can't write to the .exe of a running process).

[mysteryman]

i only quickly skimmed the page, but it said something about being able to be run from usb drives, through temporary directories, similar to u3 i would imagine... but as i said i skimmed, might have misunderstood

[skrommel]

  Does this one work?

Removable - Eject removable drives by doubleclicking in a list of drives.

Features:
- Place it on your QuickRun toolbar for easy access.
- Show drive letter, volume label, type, free space, available space, status and serial number.
- Doubleclick to eject, retract or disconnect a drive.



You'll find the downloads and more info at 1 Hour Software by Skrommel.

Skrommel

[mysteryman]

unfortunately... no

from testing, it APPEARS at first glance to do an "eject" this is not exactly what the original application does, however it may be one step it does.
your application (minimum on vista, would have to test on xp later to confirm) takes the filesystem offline, but the drive letter remains enabled on pc
while this may be a good option for cd drives, (i noticed you list those too... so might wanna leave it as a right click option) and while it probobly would WORK for usb drives (though, not quite as clean) it does not work whatsoever on fixed disks (hotswappable sata drives) which require you to "uninstall" the drive from device manager, program may require a admin account after its fixed

thanks for trying, hope you can fix it... i was so excited till i noticed the problem

btw, the link on the name goes to idlerun, the download link goes to removable ;-) might wanna double check your copy/paste

[skrommel]

  Apart from macroing your actions, I've got no suggestions. I just came accross some new functionality in AHK's helpfile, and thought I'd try it out.

Sorry.

Skrommel