The Safely Remove Hardware icon in Windows 7 offers the ability to eject my SATA drives, including the boot drive. I don't see myself ever needing this – especially not from the convenience of the tray icon.
Is there a common BIOS setting to disable hot-swappability?
Best Answer
The answer really depends on what driver you're set up with. I have a 6 port SATA connector (Intel ICH9 - 2922) and I use the default MS-AHCI driver. If you're in the same boat, create a couple of new keys here:
_
Now create a new DWORD - name:
TreatAsInternalPort
, value:1
under each of theChannelN
keys. Now reboot for the changes to take effect and the drives should no longer show up under 'Safely Remove..'Geeky stuff:
The root cause of the problem is the SATA driver incorrectly determined that your internal SATA port is external. So, if you look at the 'Capabilities' value for your drive(s) under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\IDE\..\..
its probably set at 0x4 which makes it removable (as per the bit flag ORing done of the values below) Once you add the setting to the registry, the SATA driver now returns a different Capabilities value (most probably 0) and the drive stops showing up under 'Safely Remove..'