Windows XP Safely Remove Hardware trick

WindowsXP

For some reason the Windows XP taskbar icon for safely removing USB flash drives and hard drives disappears from XP systems from time to time. Running this command (or creating a shortcut to execute it) can bring up the necessary window to safely remove the disk.

%SystemRoot%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

Obviously Windows XP isnt the Boolean operating system of choice (usually OSX 10.5, or Windows7) but sometimes the XP test environment is utilised under VMWare Fusion, and this solves an annoying problem.

3 thoughts on “Windows XP Safely Remove Hardware trick”

  1. Hey, thank you so much for this tip… I thought I was going crazy when I couldnt find the icon in the taskbar. After a lot of searching the internet I finally stumbled upon this…you’re a lifesaver for a stupid problem.

  2. I thought I was going crazy when I had this issue. Thanks for the fix, maybe it is time to finally upgrade to Win 7.

  3. Do you know how to move the Show Desktop in Windows 7 from the right hand side back to the left? Its so annoying!

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