How to "Un-Eject" a USB Flash drive -- Eject is easy (safely remove hardware), but what about Un-Eject or Reconnect?

windows usb mount usb-flash-drive eject

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You need to remount the drive. Depending on the operating system there are several ways to do this.

Assuming Windows:

Right click My Computer and select Properties (or you can simultaneously press Win+Pause/Break key). In System Properties window, go to the Hardware tab and then click the Device Manager button. In Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can just click the Device Manager link located at the left hand sidebar when you are at the System Properties window.

Click View from the menu bar and select “Devices by Connection“.

Find the parent USB Root Hub of the USB device that has a yellow color exclamation mark. Right click on the USB Root Hub and select Disable. Again right click on the same USB Root Hub that you’ve just disabled and this time select Enable.

From Remount Ejected or Safely Removed Drive.

A little Google-Fo will yield results for OS X and various Linux distro's.

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GeekAbhiGeek

I started with Apple Basic and 6502 machine code and Assembly, then went onto Fortran, Pascal, C, Lisp (Scheme), microcode, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Objective-C. Originally, I was going to go with an Atari... but it was a big expense for my family... and after months of me nagging, my dad agreed to buy an Apple ][. At that time, the Pineapple was also available. The few months in childhood seem to last forever. A few months nowadays seem to pass like days. Those days, a computer had 16kb or 48kb of RAM. Today, the computer has 16GB. So it is in fact a million times. If you know what D5 AA 96 means, we belong to the same era.

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

GeekAbhiGeek over 1 year
There are times after I eject a USB Flash drive, I want to copy some more files over to the USB Flash drive. In this case, do I always need to unplug the drive and plug it back in? Is there a way to "reconnect" or "un-eject" the drive?

To eject, that are two ways:
1. Right click the drive (say H:) and choose Eject
2. Click "Safely remove hardware" from the icon tool
But there seems to be no way to un-eject or reconnect a drive.
quack quixote about 14 years

note that disabling & re-enabling the Root Hub will reset all devices on that hub -- it will work, but that could be a nasty side effect under some circumstances. if there are other USB drives on that hub, you should eject/unmount them all before performing this procedure.
Pacerier over 12 years

Why is a restart required before this will work? : screenshoot.me/JuItNj
HNL over 12 years

I too get the same dialog box as @Pacerier.
Pacerier over 12 years

@HNL exactly, that sorta defeats the purpose
martineau over 11 years

@Pacerier: Maybe you get the restart required message because you're using Win XP and Josh K isn't.
Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 about 10 years

See How do I get Windows Vista or Windows 7 to re-attach a USB device without having to plug it in again?
GeekAbhiGeek about 10 years

a reboot? can't I just pull the USB Flash drive out and plug it back in?
CoreyJJohnson about 6 years

This answer may be rediculous, but technically is accurate :)