Yes, I agree, "unmounted" is a bit ambiguous. Between logical drive assignments, physical drive hardware, types of drives, physical media, and perhaps even partitioning of the media, the terms can be subject to interpretation.I guess it depends on what one considers "unmounted" to be on Windows. For me it seems to be a mixed bag. Some USB SD Card readers I have present as a drive, even multiple drives, in File Explorer when connected even with no cards inserted, those drives persist after cards have been accessed then removed. Others show nothing, don't present as a drive, until a card is inserted, and the drive disappears when the card is ejected.Yes; however, on Windows, ejecting media does not normally unmount the drive, it simply ensures that all buffers are flushed and it's safe to remove the media.
The problem I usually encounter is that Windows will often detect that a card which has been formatted and ejected is actually still present but not in a format it recognises or expects, throws up a warning message and offers to reformat any non-FAT partitions. I presume this is a part of auto-detect, auto-play, or something similar, that the ejected card is seen as newly inserted by something else.
For the SD card slot on my system, when I "eject" I get a tone and a message "Safe to remove hardware", and the drive assignment will no longer display in File Explorer. If I then insert another card, the drive shows again in File Explorer with an assignment.
However, after running the Imager, drive assignment no longer works automatically, although the physical device and media are discoverable in Disk Management; this is what I meant as "unmounted" in relation to the problem presented by the original poster.
So, yes, there were two different situations I encountered. The first was that no drive letter got assigned to my SD slot after running Imager, no matter what card I inserted, much as the original poster described. This problem is solved by manually assigning a drive in Disk Management. The second situation is as you described, where Windows throws a message because it doesn't recognize the card's format (probably ext4 as I mentioned in my previous post.) In my experience, other cards, having FAT32, will show up.
I really wasn't trying to get to get into too many technical details, I was simply trying to address the OP's situation, which I also encountered, and outline the solution I used, and the fact that it worked for my set-up.
Statistics: Posted by sched56 — Thu Jan 22, 2026 7:16 pm