Lost Safely Remove USB Hardware icon in Windows XP?

I plugged my 4GB USB drive into my home laptop and copied some recent tours photos to share with friends.. I copied over the select photos.. and then plugged the USB out once copying was over... and then when I connected to my friends laptop..my flashdrive FAT had been corrupted!!

See.. i missed the step to Safely remove my hardware from Windows XP and removed the USB key without actually turning it off from Windows..and since Windows has some sort of delayed write to these disks... the end result was that Windows was not aware that USB stick has been removed and I lost all data on my list.. most likely the FAT table got corrupted..

And why did I not eject the drive?It turns out.. I do not have that icon appearing on my taskbar when I insert my USB stick...

Formatted my USB key again...:( and then googled to see if can get around the problem caused my messy Windows...

and yes you can manually trigger that Safely remove hardware by following :-

1. Click on Start-> Run

2. Type %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

3. Hit Ok.. and you should be done..

Another better approach.. if you would like to use it more often is to create a Windows shortcut and add the above command to shortcut.. and then just double click and stop any USB hardware and eject them safely...

Hope it helps..