All of my hard drives show as removeable

Strange - all of my hard drives, even my C drive, show up on the "Safely Remove Hardware" menu. They are correctly listed under "Hard Disk Drives", not "Devices with Removeable Storage", yet they still appear on the "Safely Remove" menu. I am not going to try ejecting the C drive for fun. How do I get the "Safely Remove" menu cleaned up? All drives are selected for "Better Performance" and "Enable Write Caching" on the Policies tab. I am using Windows 7 Pro 64.

Hi, you need to use Optimize for quick removal instead of Better Performance.

Mine also do this until I have the correct chipset drivers installed. (on a fresh install)

You might check to see if you have the correct chipset drivers.

madmartian said:

Strange - all of my hard drives, even my C drive, show up on the "Safely Remove Hardware" menu. They are correctly listed under "Hard Disk Drives", not "Devices with Removeable Storage", yet they still appear on the "Safely Remove" menu. I am not going to try ejecting the C drive for fun. How do I get the "Safely Remove" menu cleaned up? All drives are selected for "Better Performance" and "Enable Write Caching" on the Policies tab. I am using Windows 7 Pro 64.

Click to expand...

I believe that's normal for SATA drives, if your SATA controller is running in AHCI mode. (The drives are actually hot-swappable, although few have the hardware to make that convenient.)

I don't know of any way to get rid of the entries from the "safely remove hardware" section.

No, it won't let you remove the OS drive.

If you get the correct controller drivers they will not be in the list of removable drives is still my guess.

Dinesh, I'm afraid you have that backwards. "Optimize for Quick Removal" is the setting for removable drives, which these are not. I think bobkn is right - Unlike Vista, Windows 7 is correctly recognizing these as hot swappable. I just wish there was a way to exclude them from the list. I don't want to eject the wrong drive by accident and then have to reboot (or open up the case) to activate it again.

madmartian said:

Dinesh, I'm afraid you have that backwards. "Optimize for Quick Removal" is the setting for removable drives, which these are not. I think bobkn is right - Unlike Vista, Windows 7 is correctly recognizing these as hot swappable. I just wish there was a way to exclude them from the list. I don't want to eject the wrong drive by accident and then have to reboot (or open up the case) to activate it again.

Click to expand...

I didnt setup anthing on my own. These are default option on a clean install of Win7.

Some more searching turned up this usefull app that solves the problem:

Download USB Safely Remove for free

After researching this for some time i have finally found a solution in this microsoft-issued document:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/E/7/7E7662CF-CBEA-470B-A97E-CE7CE0D98DC2/eSATA.docx

I'll try to summarize it here, but take a look for yourself if it's not clear enough:
"To work around this problem, you can disable external SATA support on a per-channel basis by setting the value of the TreatAsInternalPort registry key to 1 and then rebooting the system."

What this actually means is that you first need to find out on which channel your drive is connected, and then set a certain registry value accordingly. Do this by going to Device Manager -> Disk Drives; Right click your drive and click Properties. On the General tab look at Location. There are several numbers here, but i think that only "channel" matters to us. My channel was 0.

Now open your registry (with admin privileges) and go to:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel0 (change the last digit according to you drive's channel).
If this key doesn't exist you're gonna have to create it (I had to create Controller0\Channel0).
Here create a new DWORD value with the following properties:
Value name: TreatAsInternalPort
Value data: 1
Base: Hexadecimal

You can shorten this process by entering the following in the command line:
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel0" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001

Now just reboot!
This worked for me. Hope it helps.

The suggestion from VeeTee is excellent and works.

If you update your bios and your motherboard drivers, you will probably find that the registry location is set correctly.

ATA Device Error Fix

Download and run the following file with administrative privilege View attachment ATA FIX.bat

I installed the ahci and sata drivers from my motherboard CD and they are no longer listed as removable. This should solve your problem.

This is why I love this forum.

After ignoring/dealing-with/and generally avoiding this issue on my own box for 9 months, I finally got off my butt and installed the AHCI drivers from my motherboard CD as DirtyElf suggested. Issue solved. And, in Device Manager I no longer have all 6 SATA ports showing as devices, only the 2 that are actually in use.

For those about to rock, a step by step:
Install the Motherboard's AHCI Driver (Replacing the standard Microsoft driver)

• Open Device Manager
• Navigate to IDE/ATA/ATAPI Controller > ***AHCI Serial ATA Controller (the actual name varies but will have AHCI in it)
• Right click > Properties
• Choose: Update Driver
• Browse to the folder that contains the AHCI driver from Motherboard CD> Select > OK
• “Successful” Message > Close
• “Must Restart > Restart
• Drivers Install > Another Restart necessary > Restart
• Drivers successfully Installed. Remove Hardware Icon no longer showing.

Thorstein (or is it just the Veblen that you inherited from the great philosopher and economist),
Glad to hear problem solved and thanks for the update.

Ding Ding Ding! Give that man a prize!!