Creating a shortcut and hotkey to Windows’ "Safely Remove Hardware" dialog

In a previous post I talked about using Windows’ “Safely Remove Hardware” dialog to avoid losing data from USB drives. Having done some more research, I’ve found a way to create a shortcut to this dialog.

The shortcut is simple to create, and uses a RunDll32.exe command that looks like this:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

• To create it, right-click on your desktop and select New, then Shortcut.
• In the Create Shortcut dialog, paste the above command, and click “Next”.
• Name it what you will, for example “Ejecting USB Drives”.
• Click “Complete”.

If you want to, you could also assign a hotkey:

• Right-click the newly made shortcut and click Properties
• In Properties, select the “Hotkey” field, and enter the hotkey you’d like, e.g. Win+S
• Click Use, then OK