How to "Safely Remove Hardware"

all drives should be visible in the finder. to disconnect a flash drive, open the finder and click the eject button that appears just to the right of the flash drive icon in the upper left portion of the finder window.

I recommend not dragging it to the trash. With my flash drive (Verbatim 1GB) this does not work. What happens is I try to drag it to the trash and all it does is remove it from finder. If you look closely when you drag it off the finder it goes up in a little poof of smoke. It never appears in the trash. If you opened another finder window you would see it is still mounted.

You can also highlight the flash drive and click file in the finder toolbar. The "Move to trash" command is grayed out. Under that you will see an eject command here also.

The best way is to use the eject icon in finder to do this. Otherwise when you try to remove your flash drive you will get an error message,

Mort

If you drag it out of the sidebar then you're likely to run into the error of which you speak, because doing that only determines whether or not the drive will show up in the sidebar - otherwise, dragging the icon to the trash should work.

Drag the icon right into the trash.

yeah, that works too!

Thats interesting. My verbatim won't do that. It juts goes poof but stays mounted. I will just have to use the eject switch.

Mort