Failed to Safely Remove USB External Hard Drive = Bad?

My new internet hard drive came in today, I plugged it into the enclosure and plugged it into my laptop. It didn't recognize it, and unplugged it without using the Safe to Remove Hardware icon. I then re-plugged it in and noticed it was there. I then found out that I had to initialize the drive before it would actually show up on My Computer. During the whole time its plugged in, the drive is still humming quietly, but the activity indicator isn't blinking.

I know doing that for USB drives is bad, but in my case, since the drive was uninitialized, unpartitioned, etc. Does it do no damage to it? I heard that the safe to remove hardware icon mainly affects USB drives because the USB is the only thing powering the USB drive and is especially bad if you are transferring files to and fro.

My external hard drive is plugged in by both USB and AC Power adapter. Since I didn't do any transferring whatsoever and the drive was uninitialized in this case, is it safe to say my drive is still 100% factory state with no bad sectors or errors of any kind?

Or should I get a replacement?

 

Unsafely removing hardware is only unsafe for data integrity and has no risk of damaging the hardware. Your drive should be OK.

 

with hard drives its diasabled, but with removable storage devices you can enable it so you can just rip it out.

 

Also depends if your drive is optimized for quick removal or performance....

 

Improperly unplugging a USB drive, assuming you aren't writing anything to it in the meantime, is like jumping out of your house during a thunderstorm carrying a piece of sheet metal and angrily flipping off the clouds with your free hand - before jumping back into the safety of your house. You aren't very likely to get stuck by lightning in the three seconds you're standing outside, but you're still tempting fate.

Now, if the drive is being actively used at the time, you're much more likely to mess things up.

 

no worries.
i have a 40gb mp3 player which i pulled out off the usb dozens of time without removing it properly (not proud of it, just windows sometimes too irritating).
never lost a single file, just make sure you're not writing to it, then usually no damage if "unsafely removing".

anyway you can run scandisk to be sure.

 

I just checked the setting and yes it is currently set to

"Optimize for Quick Removal"

Though in Device Manager it shows up as a Generic External USB Device, so I don't know if that applies to the hard drive or not. Despite being an enclosure, it should refer to the hard drive right?

 

i think its just sata and pata HDD's that can't be optimised for quick removal.

 

Windows XP is very good with removing hardware "unsafely" and I never use the safely remove hardware wizard in XP or Vista.
You don't risk hardware damage (unless the device is powered only by USB, such as a WD passport, and that's still highly unlikely, it's just as bad as hard powering down a computer which rarely does damaged these days)
You only risk losing data, and again, XP is really good with this. All I have ever lost is recycler data and pagefiles. Never lost anything else.

Now 2000... that's a different story. I always use safely remove hardware there.

sidenote: I work in a PC repair shop with 3 other knowledgeable techs, we all follow this rule: 2000 or earlier, safely remove, XP/Vista, don't sweat it.

 

I got a SATA Seagate Momentus 7200.3

The device is being powered both through USB and Outlet I believe. I read in the manual that connect USB first, then plug in adapter. Though depending on the internal hard drive installed into the enclosure, USB alone might be sufficient.

 

is it phyciacally connected to the computer via a sata port is what i meant.

 

Then it's no problem... no chance that you damaged the drive physically.

 

If its optimized for quick removal....Then there is no problem..!!

I have all my external HDDs (IDE and SATA in enclosures), optimized for quick removal....and never done that 'stop device' thing..!!

Below the quick removal policy, it is stated that there is no need to stop the device before removing..!!

All my external HDDs show up as 'generic usb devices usb disks'....So I guess it is something to do with the Plug and Play drivers that are installed by the device, and windows only recognizes them as generic, since it can't keep track of all brands..!!

 

I rarely use an external HDD, but I never use safely remove for flashdrives or SD cards - I just wait like 20 or 30 seconds after I have last transferred something.

Like previously mentioned though - you can only do that with XP or newer operating systems.

 

Solution

1) get Unlocker 1.8.7
2) when you run into failed to safely remove hardware message, right click on the USB drive that you want to remove
3) choose Unlocker from the context menu that popped up
4) hit the Unlock All button
5) now the try to do the Safely Remove Hardware thing again, it should work.

Thats it.

 

Neat! I just ran a chkdsk on my drive and there are 0 bad sectors, everything looks normal and fine. Thanks guys!

 

it's good to see so much CORRECT information on this subject...

i'm amazed someone isn't ranting on and on about how harmful and distructive removing the device without stopping it first could be....

but like everyone has stated... the only real chance of harm comes from removing the device (plug) while data is being accessed or WRITTEN in particular!!