Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Missing 'Safely remove hardware' icon

I was playing with my USB portable hard drive and found to my horror that the icon in the Windows task bar that allows me to safely remove hardware was gone. I didn't want to unplug the cable before choosing that option because I wanted to make sure my data were intact.

I did a bunch of searching, but the proper keywords eluded me. A bunch of people suggested using File Explorer and choosing 'Eject' as though it were a CD/DVD but I didn't have an eject option.

Finally, I came across the answer here: http://blog.monkeyless.com/2006/03/12/safely-removing-hardware-when-the-icon-is-gone/ The secret keyword is hotplug, and so I can find it again, here is the DLL to invoke from Start->Run %windir%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll Alternately, make a shortcut by right clicking on the desktop.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

WDSC on a portable drive

Well I loaded WDSC 7.0.0.6 on my USB portable drive. I stupidly could not locate the Code/400 CDs, so I didn't get that loaded :-( I was able to get Eclipse Monkey installed, which made me very happy. WDSC is sort of Eclipse 3.2 (Ganymede) and Monkey is in the Europa distro (sort of 3.3) but it did go in via the normal Help->Software updates->Install new software.

Hurrah!