"Safely remove hardware" icon is missinbg

Hi,

I have an external USB hard drive but the "Safely Remove Hardware"
icon is missing from System Tray even after rebooting. How would I
get that back? I really don't want to damage my external drive.

Western Digital, the hard drive's manufacturer suggested searching the
Microsoft Knowledge Base but my search didn't yield any results.

Running Windows 2000 Pro with all service packs and critical updates.
Thank you so much to anyone who could offer some advice.

Gail
.