Thinkpads Forum

Well, I bought an Audigy 2 ZS for my T60. Only thing I am concerned about is that I removed it before Windows shut completely down.

I was trying to do a system restore, and I popped the card out of the slot. So my question is, can this damage my card and or my laptop? How serious is this?

Thanks Sean

You probably are ok, but it is not a good idea to do that. There is a risk of damaging the card or possibly some drivers or software files that were in use at the time.

Press Fn + F9 to bring up the EasyEject Utility, and stop the device before removing it. You can also use the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the Notification area on the lower right. It looks kind of like a silver card with a green arrow pointing to the left on top of it.

With some cards (my Sony Ericsson card, for examples), the voltages on the card require that the user employ the "Safely Remove Hardware" function, else the card may be physically damaged. ... JD Hurst

I can tell you one thing you don't ever want to do, leave a $60 Lexar Card in the slot on your machine when you do a system recovery, either from the CD's or the HPA. I've ruined two Lexar cards doing this . I have a sandisk card reader that I use a lot every day to flash firmawares on machines, i never use the safely remove hardware and have had no problems, but JD is right certain card readers that require more voltage may not be so forgiving.

Not so worried about the card. How about my motherboard?

Sean

You could damage the card slot where a card would no longer work in it. Whether the damage would actually be on the motherboard or in the PC Card/ExpressCard slot, I couldn't say.

I had a ThinkPad 600E that had 2 PC Card slots. Originally both slots worked. Later, one of the slots quit working - I am not quite sure why. Device Manager showed both slots to be working normally. Diagnostics built in to the BIOS showed both slots to be working normally. A fresh install of Windows made no difference. Point being, you can fry one of your slots without having other damage. In the case of the T60, you have one PC Card slot, and one ExpressCard slot. If you fry a slot, you don't have a backup. Perhaps replacing the PC Card/ExpressCard slot part would fix it, and perhaps not.

bJD Hurst:

With some cards (my Sony Ericsson card, for examples), the voltages on the card require that the user employ the "Safely Remove Hardware" function, else the card may be physically damaged. ... JD Hurst

This is what I was talking about.

I've had 6 or 7 600 series machine and a few of them had one bad pcmcia slot.

Well, returned the Audigy notebook card for several reasons. Could not get the software to recognize it for MIDI, and I decided I really didn't need it.

My first inclination was that I had damaged the slot, but I am using a wireless card in the slot now and it works fine.