How to safely remove eSATA drive when it's not in the Safely Remove Hardware dialog

I have Windows 7 32bit which was installed when the SATA devices on my PC (DVD & HDDs) were set as AHCI in the BIOS. Today I added two extra disks that are to be set up as RAID 1 so I went into the BIOS and switched from AHCI to SATA. This caused Win 7 to bluescreen on startup so following a solution found online I made a registry change which fixed the issue. I set up my RAID volume, installed Intel Rapid Storage Technology (from the mobo driver disk) and it all looks good. I can use all my SATA devices and everything is present in Disk Management as well as in Intel Rapid Storage Technology.

The thing is all the SATA devices have now disappeared from Devices and Printers and from the Safely Remove Hardware dialog. I assume the later happened because of the former. Is this normal?

I don't really mind except I have an external HDD connected via eSATA and I'd like to switch it off. Is there anything I should do beforehand to safely unmount or should I just turn it off?

Solution 1:

Go to my computer, right click on the external harddrive, click properties at the bottom. Go to the hardware tab, click on the correct disk and click properties. If there is a button in the general tab that says "Change Settings" click it. Then go to the policies and select the quick removal option. This will allow you to unplug the drive at almost any time without there being errors.