Not able to safely remove external harrdrive through notification icon

I'm using a Lenovo yoga 3 pro for the first time, with Windows 10 pre-installed, so I haven't made any changes or updates. The icon in the notification tray for Safely Remove Hardware is there, but when I click (left and right) on it, the external harddrive is listed, but in grey (unclickable) and there is no option to safely remove it. The only other option (in bold, the only clickable thing) is to Open Devices and Printers, where the external harddrive is not listed. (Which is a problem I'd also like to solve.)

I've run "C:\WINDOWS\system32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll" and get a message when I try to stop it that says the device "is not removable and cannot be ejected or unplugged". Any ideas? Thanks.

I have the same issue as leeky.

For me, the problem exists only in Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 1809 b17763 x64 en-US. Updating to the currently latest sub-build (17763.2565) does not fix this issue. The computer in question must stay on the LTSC build, so cannot upgrade to a more recent build.

USB device partitions/volumes appear in the Safely Remove list when I click on the icon in the notification area, but the line that should be there "Eject XXX" is missing, so I cannot safely eject them from there.

I have other computers running on Windows 10 Pro b19044.XXX x64 en-US and on these machines the Safely Remove option works normally.

I can't figure-out the difference in this behavior, and I'm almost certain that a simple registry change will fix it.
Just don't know exactly which key/value to change. Any ideas?