Month: February 2014

Ejecting recalcitrant USB disks

I’ve got a couple of USB SATA caddies that I often have problems with when I try to remove them safely to switch them off. The disks in them are seen by the system as fixed drives, and the System process (pid 4) often opens some system files (in the $extend folder) on them that prevent the USB device being removed. Because they are seen as fixed drives there’s no Eject option in Explorer.

I’ve finally discovered how to eject them safely. Open Disk Management (either through Control Panel, or just running diskmgmt.msc) and set the disks to be offline by right clicking on the disk name in the lower panel. Then they can be ejected. The only problem is that they will remain offline, so you need to make them online again before they can be used next time.

Setting up a simple Windows 7 VPN

Although I work mostly from home, I rent a hot desk at a local business centre, and take my laptop in there to work on a couple of times a week just for a change of scene and because I get a large discount in their cafe. I often need to connect to my home network while I’m there, and I’ve been doing it by having a remote desktop port open on the router. This is far from ideal, and so I decided to set up a VPN. Both the home PC and the laptop are running Windows 7 Ultimate, which has VPN built in, so it should have been a 10 minute job, but it wasn’t. It just took me all morning to get it working. Continue reading “Setting up a simple Windows 7 VPN”