I have the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" icon in my system tray. One of my drives, a WD20EARS (WD Green 2TB) is listed there. I want the icon to go away since I obviously have no need to eject the drive.
How can I stop Windows from thinking it's a drive that's ejectable?
Is this a new drive recently added? Is this drive the primary drive or just for storage? Is this an internal drive or external drive? Did you follow the manufacturers directions for installing the drive if it's an internal HDD.
SATA Hard Drive - How to Install and Setup
Is this a new drive recently added?
No. It's around 2 months old, but I did a CPU/board swap last week and now I have the above issue. I installed all the chipset and storage controller drivers. The "eject" option was available from the first time I booted with the new motherboard. The motherboard in question is an ASUS P8Z68-V Pro.
Is this drive the primary drive or just for storage?
Storage.
Did you follow the manufacturers directions for installing the drive if it's an internal HDD.
Yes it's installed correctly. It has no functional issues.
This is a common problem when running on the generic AHCI driver supplied in Windows 7.
The solution is to install the correct AHCI driver for your computer.
First - find the AHCI driver. These usually come in the motherboard CD if this were a custom build. For a laptop you would need to see if there is one in the manufacturer's downloads section, contact the manufacturer, or find out the brand of motherboard, check the specs, and see if you can find a suitable driver. The generic Intel driver works for many boards based on Intel chipsets and can be found on Intel's website.
Once you have the correct AHCI driver you install it thus:
- Open Device Manager
- Navigate to IDE/ATA/ATAPI Controller > ***AHCI Serial ATA Controller
- Right click > Properties
- Choose: Update Driver
- Browse to the folder that contains the AHCI driver you downloaded > Select > OK
- “Successful” Message > Close
- “Must Restart > Restart
- Drivers Install > Another Restart necessary > Restart
- Drivers successfully Installed. Remove Hardware Icon no longer showing.
*** : the name of the AHCI device is different for different systems, but it should be the only one with AHCI in it's name.
See if that will help.
I already have it in IDE mode.
Is there a way to swap to AHCI without data loss? It's actually something I wanted to do, but I was under the impression you had to reinstall Windows to make the switch.
Edit: Just checked BIOS.
The 6 ports provided by my Intel chipset are listed in the BIOS, just like in the screenshot above (except with no hotplug option, since I'm in IDE mode). The 2 SATA ports provided by the Marvell controller are not listed. Unfortunately I plugged the drive in question into one of those ports. I assume swapping the drive over to a different port will solve this.
Edit 2:
Ugh another random issue with the drive: 15k load/unload cycles generated in the last 2-3 days. Stupid Superfetch. I guess changing the board made Windows take notice of the drive? who knows.
Last edited by wegtet; 30 Sep 2011 at 22:33.
I suspect that you have the Marvel Storage Controller set to AHCI.
Go to Advanced / Onboard Device Configuration / Marvell Storage Controller.
Is it set to IDE or AHCI?
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