shutdown a hard drive

Question

How can you shutdown a harddrive ? i want to do this to be able to safely remove my sata drive even though it's hotplug. WMI does't seems to have the method.

Answer 1

Solution without any popping dialogs:

just use

sync

from cygwin (sync is utility from coreutils)

Answer 2

Using WMI, you can get the 'eject drive' dialog to pop up using:

Shell "Rundll32.exe Shell32.dll Control_RunDLLA hotplug.dll", vbNormalFocus

Alternatively, if you want to programatically eject a device, you need this MSDN article. This should work with sata drives, if you can eject them manually then you'll be able to 'eject' them programatically.