Windows – Why the internal hard disk can be ejected

hard driveremovable-mediasatawindows 7

I have 6 hard disks in my computer and one DVD.
The disk that I connect to the 6th SATA port is a regular disk. But my Windows 7 64 bit shows it as a removable drive. I can eject my hard disk! Just like a pen drive.
If I connect another disk to the 6th port, I can eject that disk too. So it has nothing to do with the physical disk, it must be something related to Windows or BIOS

I don't understand why Windows 7 is seeing a normal hard disk as removable.
In Computer Management – Disk Management, the disk looks identical to the others – there is nothing there to suggest the drive is different from the others.
But in the tray I have the icon to eject it.

The motherboard model is ASUS F2A85 V PRO FM2 and it has 7 SATA ports. All the disks are formatted normally, no Dynamic Disk, no RAID, nothing special.

How can I tell Windows 7 to treat the disk exactly like the others, so it can't be ejected?

Best Answer

Its Normal for AHCI SATA mode which supports a feature called hot swapping : Enables you to swap hard disk without powering down the whole system

Citation : Internal SATA hard disk shows up as removable device on Windows 7

You are supposed to update Your SATA driver : Microsoft provide AHCI driver than install this hotfix

MS KB article : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977178

INTEL than install Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver

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Windows 7 – Internal SATA Hard Disk Shows as Removable Device

This happens if the SATA controller is set to AHCI mode. AHCI supports hot swapping, and because of this, you can ask Windows to "Safely Remove" an internal hard disk, disconnecting it from the OS and replace it without having to power down the system.

Windows – External Hard Drive being incorrectly recognized as Internal Hard Disk

My source: http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtrouble_e.html#partitioning

I know it talks about flash drives, but the 'removable bit' is common between all USB removable drives.

Nearly all USB flash drives pretend to have a removable media
(even it's a lie), so Windows detects them as 'removable'. On 
drives with a removable media Windows 2000 and higher supports 
only one partition.
Finally it's a single bit in the device's device descriptor, 
the removable media bit (RMB). If you take away the RMB then 
Windows sees the drive as 'local disk' and multiple partitions 
work.
The Removable Media Bit can be changed either in the drive's 
hardware or by a Windows filter driver.

Lexar BootIt is mentioned in many places for changing the RMB, but be warned: A couple of places i've read it can damage USB-pendrives (i'm guessing the RMB on these devices is hardware coded in some way). In theory you won't have a problem as you've already successfully removed it.

opsin makes a good point about reinstating the original software/filesystem on the device, in theory returning it to factory settings will restore the RMB bit. My guess is that windows removed the removable bit when you created multiple partitions followed by formatting.

Best Answer

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Windows 7 – Internal SATA Hard Disk Shows as Removable Device

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