What makes this so useful ? - bgbennyboy/USB-Disk-Ejector GitHub Wiki

It is quick. Rather than clicking through the "Safely Remove Hardware" dialog you can very quickly remove drives or card media. You can even create shortcuts or hotkeys to eject a drive.

It is simple. The program is designed to be easy to use and its advanced options are hidden so that they dont get in the way.

It is portable. It can be stored and used on a removable device like a pen drive. It can even eject the disk that it is running from. It doesnt require administrator rights and doesnt need installing.

It is flexible. There are many features that can be customised such as hotkeys, positioning, notifications and post-eject actions.

It can be run as a command line program.
The command line options are very flexible, they can be used to:

  • Eject the drive that the program is running from.
  • Eject a drive by specifying a drive letter.
  • Eject a drive by specifying a drive name.
  • Eject a drive by specifying a mountpoint
  • Eject a drive by specifying a partial drive name.

So you could setup a desktop shortcut or bat file to eject a drive. Or if you use a menu such as PStart or the Portable Apps launcher you could use the command line switches so that with one click the menu will exit, the program will run and the drive will be ejected. See the 'Command Line ' section below for more information.

It can eject disks when Vista cant. In Vista, disks often cant be ejected because they have an open explorer window. Other versions of Windows will close any explorer windows belonging to a disk but Vista often doesnt - so USB Disk Ejector closes does it before ejecting.

It can eject disks when Windows sometimes cant. If any applications are running from a disk then Windows wont be able to eject it. USB Disk Ejector can detect and auto-close any applications running from the disk before ejecting. Please note this closes applications that were launched from the disk not applications that have opened a file on the disk. See the limitations section further down for more information.

It is small. Less than 1MB.

It is open source. All source code can be found on my USB Disk Ejector Website.

What do I need to use this?

A removable USB or Firewire device such as a flash drive, digital camera or external hard drive. Any USB or Firewire device that shows as a disk should be removable by this.

For ejecting card media - such as flash memory cards any internal or external card reader should work.

More features:

  • Double right clicking on a drive opens an explorer window for that disk

  • Drives mounted in a folder like this are also supported.

  • If your card reader is shown as a drive not a card reader then you can change this. In options go to the Card Readers tab. There you can define a particular drive as a card reader, it will then be treated and shown as a card reader.

  • The program has a system tray icon - you can right click this to eject disks. This is similar to the behaviour of the Windows "Safely Remove Hardware" tray icon.

  • Settings are saved in a file called USB_Disk_Eject.cfg - but this wont be created unless you change a setting in the options. It will always be saved into the same place as the program itself.

  • If you have a disk that has multiple drives (eg a hard drive with multiple partitions) then this can be set to only show one entry in the program. To enable this tick "show drives with partitions as one entry" in the options. If you enable this option then hovering your mouse over the disk will being up a tooltip showing what disks 'belong' to that entry.

There are many more features - click on "More" and go to "Options" to see the full list.