Mounting/unmounting usb drives (XP)

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In 98SE I could plug in and unplug cf cards and pen drives and everything worked OK. As I understand it, with XP the advice seems to be always to use the ‘Safely remove hardware’ icon before unplugging. I assume this is to purge any hanging data and unmount the drive.

I recently acquired a multiple card reader which I leave attached to one of my usb ports. It maps to 2 separate drive letters irrespective of whether there are cards present on Windows startup or not. At this point plugging in cards works OK.

The problem is that I then use the ‘Safely remove’ icon in order to remove a card and BOTH drives associated with the card reader disappear. Only a complete restart will bring the card reader back.

My question is therefore how does one dismount and remove a card without losing the card reader? Should I worry about using the ‘Safely remove’ icon and just pull the card out? Would I actually lose data?

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> Only a complete restart will bring the card reader back.

I have a much simpler card reader, but sometimes inserting a card does not cause Windows to autodetect the new device. There is a “scan now” option in the Device Management dialog (a button in some other dialog, I can never remember where). I wish there were a quick way to access that function so that I could, either from the desktop of a brief Start>Run entry, scan for new hardware. Anyone know the secret?

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I have an Antec Photochute USB card reader and never ‘remove’ it. The manual said to ‘NEVER remove a card when the red light is flashing’ – i.e. when it is being read or written to – so I assumed at any other time was OK.
So far no problem, I just insert and remove the cards whenever and haven’t suffered from any loss of data. As far as I am concerned, the ‘hardware’ is the reader, not the card.

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