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Computers
Flash Drives and USB Devices
At the suggestion of her computer helper, Mom is using a pair of USB flash drives to back up her new computer. It’s a good, simple strategy that should keep her data safe in the event that her new computer unexpectedly blows up. She did come up with a question though about using these drives:I have my Flash Drive plugged in. Where do I locate its presence so that I can safely extract it? I find if I do leave it plugged in, the next time I want to turn my computer on, I get a message indicating an error and am not allowed to log on.
The short and simple answer: To remove the flash drive, double click on the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the system tray (the icon circled in red in the image at right). From the next window, select “USB Mass Storage Device” and click the Stop button. Click OK in the confirmation window and you’ll get a message that it’s ok to unplug the device. It will automatically re-enable itself when you plug it back in.You can also just unplug it while the computer is turned off, to prevent it from complaining when you restart. The reason it does that is that the computer tries to find it’s start-up (boot) files on removable devices before looking on the hard drive. When it finds the device but not the files, it throws an error. Seems silly to me; it should ask you if you want to boot from the hard drive instead. But there you are. (more…)
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