Mount USB drive

When you plugged your USB drive into the USB port, your USB drive should be detected automatically by windows. That means, windows auto-mount it for you. In Windows XP, your drive will automatically open. Now your USB drive is just like other normal drive partition. You can save and obtain data from it as normal.

Unmount USB drive

You can't just pull off the USB drive from the port without unmount it first. You might lost your data if you don't unmount it properly.

This is an example on how to unmount a USB drive (thumb drive) in windows:

Check there are many icons at the bottom right on the desktop.

Click on the USB icon.

Click on the 'Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device - Drive(?)' to unmount the drive.

You can safely remove the USB drive when you see this notification from windows:

Sometimes you'll get a message that windows cannot unmount usb drive because it is being used by another program or something like that. There are several reasons that can caused the problem. First, check that all programs or applications running from the usb drive is closed. Then try to unmount the usb drive again. If you still got the 'device busy' message, most probably your usb drive has been infected by viruses. Scan usb drive and clean/quarantine all viruses then try unmount the usb drive again.

That's all.