Removing and Ejecting Disks

Requires: Windows XP Professional

So, you plug in a USB drive, do your stuff, and then you want to take it out. Pretty common today, right? So you've got to go to your taskbar, right click that "Safely Remove Drive" icon, and so on. I thought it was kind of annoying, so I looked for a way to do this without having to use the mouse (and that was free.) And I eventually found it at this site. His english isn't too great, but he's not a native speaker and it's not -that- hard to understand.

As he says, there are several tools that claim to do this. Don't use them because they don't work correctly. For example, in XP, DevEject fails to let you know if the operation failed. If you google "safely remove usb xp command line" you'll get articles talking about the devcon tool. Don't use that either because devcon causes the device in question to be uninstalled. This is not desired and does NOT cause the device to be "unplugged." So use the tools from http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html.

So yay, now you can do usb stuff from command line. Sometimes you'll get a failure message. Unless you accidentally specified a non-removable drive, the most likely reason for this is that Windows has "locked" some of the files on the drive. So annoying, especially since you'll not know how to unlock them, since you probably already closed all he programs that were using it. If that's the case, use this program, "Unlocker", to free up those files. It works like a charm and appears in the right click menu for easy use. Download unlocker: http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/