Windows 10: No Option To Eject USB Flash Drive

New Windows 10 Pro install. When I click on the USB icon to eject a flash drive the flash drive shows up, but the option to eject USB flash memory is missing.

Windows 10 Issue




How it should look, but this is from a Win 7 machine.




:)

 

Windows 10 has trouble ejecting USB hard drives & flash drives - how to fix?

Yes because it ejects or stops read/write from all media during a shutdown or restart.

Logging Out might eject a working USB drive. But Windows can read and write to devices at the Login Screen, as the Windows kernel has remained loaded. Why not just use the Flash Icon to eject media? But it depends on what is reading and writing to the device,
Example: USB flash drive.

 

No way to eject USB flash drive / hot swap...

I recently noticed a new problem with my Windows 10 x64: the Safely Remove Hardware icon is missing from the system tray. It always used to be there.

In the "Select which icons appear on the taskbar" settings, I have "Windows Explorer, Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" switched to on. Makes no difference. I followed instructions to run "RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll", which
does open the Safely Remove Hardware window, but the only hardware devices listed are two Asmedia 106x SATA Controllers. No USB flash drive [even though it is plugged in and not safely ejected]... I don't think this should be the case.

So apparently there is now no safe way for me to remove a USB flash drive, without shutting down or restarting the computer. Not very convenient. I also have an external USB 3.0 hard drive I use for backups that I like to be able to switch off. No longer
possible to safely turn off.

I also have hot swap bays in my machine, and a hot swappable hard drive. I have been using a free program called "HotSwap!" to eject USB devices as well as hot swap the hard drive occasionally. That no longer works either. The icon is in the system tray
as always, but now every time I request a hot swap, I receive a message stating, "The device XYZ cannot be uninstalled right now because the device requested a system restart." Never used to say that. Now always says that whether for an external USB device
or the hot swappable hard drive.

I have not changed my USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller and Root Hub drivers. Those are the appropriate ASMedia drivers, not the generic Microsoft drivers. I have hot swap enabled in the BIOS. None of this has changed... Yet now, I cannot safely remove
anything.

I think I have somehow developed a corrupt driver installation, even though I haven't seen any warnings or error messages prior to all of this. And I don't see any problems in Device Manager now. How can identify the driver that is causing a
problem, and then rectify it?

Is there anything else I can do to restore the "safely remove" and "hot swap" functionality? I don't understand what has changed to make none of this work...

Thanks for any info / advice!

 

All USBs or just this one?

It may just be that the wrong driver was loaded when you first used this USB. Try opening Device Manager, find the USB in 'Disk Drives', right-click on it then 'Uninstall device' (you may need to select 'View > Show hidden devices' if the USB isn't currently connected).

 

You are probably right about the wrong driver installed or it may have been no driver installed. It was both with USB 3 and USB 2 sticks.

It was on a new PC I just built yesterday and installed Windows this morning. This afternoon after I ran update numerous times until Windows downloaded all available updates and the problem was gone the next time I plugged a USB stick in and went to eject it.

 

And don't forget in File Explorer is the Eject on the right-click menu on the drive, same for CD or DVD discs.