Hi Rick,

The HD card that was never removed was the equivalent of an SSD drive, until you removed it. The key, as pointed out by Paul, is to properly remove it.

For flash drives, one of the choices on a right-click is to Eject. I suspect this is also true for HD cards. Windows will warn if there is unfinished business.
You can also do a regular shut down of the computer, after which these can be removed. Regular shut down means using the command, not the power key.


I have not seen anything similar to Eject for portable hard drives (HDD or SSD). Shutting down before disconnecting works for those as well.
Closing Word, itself (all instances) should do the same thing but I have seen warnings when using Eject after closing Word.





Word ran into similar problems with floppy drives with the added problem of insufficient disk space.