New drive showing 'Safely remove hardware' traycon

[Rob]

Hi all

I just put a new ST3320620AS (Seagate 320G SATA) drive on this system (DFI
ut250GB), put XPSP2 on it, and although the drive works great (it's my new
boot drive), I have a Safely Remove HW notification pointing to it, in the
systray.

It shows up properly in Device Manager, it's apparently using MS drivers
5.1.2535 dated 1/07/01. When I installed the nVidia chipset drivers for the
motherboard, it asked if I wanted to use their disk drivers, and I said OK,
why not.

It seems that the system is using MS drivers anyweay, but that's the only
other bit of relevant infornation I can think of.

Wot on Earth?

Rob

 

[Og]

If you feel that you can't live without posting to more than one newsgroup,
please 'Cross-post'. Please don't 'Multi-post'.
SATA drives, because they can be hot-swapped, can, indeed, be considered to
be 'Removable' drives.
Some board makers write their drivers so that the drive is announced to
Windows as a removable "USB" device.
Some board makers don't... My wife's ABIT board does (sigh).
Steve

 

[Newbie Coder]

Og,

I have an E-ATX box with 8 SATA II cradles full with Diamond Maxtor drives &
none of them get picked up as the removable device like the OP is getting
yet they are all "Hot-Swappable" devices. I have a Gigabye twin xeon
motherboard

What the user can do is get the dialog up & uncheck the Show Unplug/Eject
icon in the taskbar & click close

In XP, you can always select the unplug from the left of the folder view

What chipset is on that board, VIA/INTEL..?

 

[Rob]

The board has an nVidia nForce 3 chipset, and I'm using the builtin SATA
controller (it has another controller on the MB, but that doesn't work when
the system is overclocked).

When I double click the systray icon, i get a dialog box allowing me to view
the properties, components and driver details for the drive, but nowhere do
I see anything about showing unplug icons. Is no big deal, it just had me
curious.

Rob

 

[DL]

Its a 'feature' of the sata controller
I have a mobo with two controllers, one shows as removable the other doesn't

 

[Anna]

Hi all

I just put a new ST3320620AS (Seagate 320G SATA) drive on this system (DFI
ut250GB), put XPSP2 on it, and although the drive works great (it's my new
boot drive), I have a Safely Remove HW notification pointing to it, in the
systray.

It shows up properly in Device Manager, it's apparently using MS drivers
5.1.2535 dated 1/07/01. When I installed the nVidia chipset drivers for
the motherboard, it asked if I wanted to use their disk drivers, and I
said OK, why not.

It seems that the system is using MS drivers anyweay, but that's the only
other bit of relevant infornation I can think of.

Wot on Earth?

Rob

Rob:
Because a SATA HDD has the potential quality of being "hot-pluggable" (some
call it "hot-swappable"), the system will sometimes treat it as a removable
drive in terms of reflecting the Safely Remove Icon in the Notification area
(Systray) similar, for example, to a USB external HDD. I'm not aware of any
practical way to disable that icon. (There are third-party programs that
presumably have that capability but I would not recommend their use). There
is, however, in XP a "Hide inactive icons" feature that you may be
interested in - see
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;279771

The (practical) bottom-line in all this is that you can just ignore the SRI;
you need not access it in any way with respect to your SATA HDD(s).
Anna

 

[Rob]

Rob:
Because a SATA HDD has the potential quality of being "hot-pluggable"
(some call it "hot-swappable"), the system will sometimes treat it as a
removable drive in terms of reflecting the Safely Remove Icon in the
Notification area (Systray) similar, for example, to a USB external HDD.
I'm not aware of any practical way to disable that icon. (There are
third-party programs that presumably have that capability but I would not
recommend their use). There is, however, in XP a "Hide inactive icons"
feature that you may be interested in - see
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;279771

The (practical) bottom-line in all this is that you can just ignore the
SRI; you need not access it in any way with respect to your SATA HDD(s).
Anna

Thanks, I've done exactly that. Funny thing is, I'd forgotten all about
hiding systray icons, and after the new install discover that it's turned on
by default. It is very handy - seems many things like to use the systray.

If there's no problems with just ignoring it then, I'll hide it

Rob

 

[Rob]

And I can 'optimise for speed' or 'optimise for quick removal', both of
which are greyed out on the old PATA drive. Fair enough, as another poster
pointed out we can have external SATA drives, but surely XP should realise
that this is the boot/sys drive. O well, it all works.

 

[Og]

1. Chipset = VIA.
2. If one disables "Show Unplug/Eject", then one no longer has a handy
method of "safely" removing USB devices.
Steve

 

[Don R]

Og said the following on 3/25/2007 12:31 PM:

1. Chipset = VIA.
2. If one disables "Show Unplug/Eject", then one no longer has a handy
method of "safely" removing USB devices.
Steve

I have an Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard with a 80 gig Seagate ST380811AS
SATA II drive as my boot drive. I get the same indications that the
drive is removable from the Safely Remove Hardware Utility and I also
get a report from MS BootVis that disk write caching is turned off. My
MB chipset is Nvidia GeForce 6150 Northbridge and 430 MCP Southbridge.
The driver for the hard drive is also Microsoft dated 7/1/2001 version
5.1.2535.0. Searching for an updated drive was unsuccessful. I would
really like to find out how to fix this as the computer seems slower
than my old system with a 30 gig SATA I drive.

 

[Don R]

Og said the following on 3/25/2007 12:31 PM:

1. Chipset = VIA.
2. If one disables "Show Unplug/Eject", then one no longer has a handy
method of "safely" removing USB devices.
Steve

I have an Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard with a 80 gig Seagate ST380811AS
SATA II drive as my boot drive. I get the same indications that the
drive is removable from the Safely Remove Hardware Utility and I also
get a report from MS BootVis that disk write caching is turned off. My
MB chipset is Nvidia GeForce 6150 Northbridge and 430 MCP Southbridge.
The driver for the hard drive is also Microsoft dated 7/1/2001 version
5.1.2535.0. Searching for an updated drive was unsuccessful. I would
really like to find out how to fix this as the computer seems slower
than my old system with a 30 gig SATA I drive.

 

[Don R]

Og said the following on 3/25/2007 12:31 PM:

1. Chipset = VIA.
2. If one disables "Show Unplug/Eject", then one no longer has a handy
method of "safely" removing USB devices.
Steve

I have an Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard with a 80 gig Seagate ST380811AS
SATA II drive as my boot drive. I get the same indications that the
drive is removable from the Safely Remove Hardware Utility and I also
get a report from MS BootVis that disk write caching is turned off. My
MB chipset is Nvidia GeForce 6150 Northbridge and 430 MCP Southbridge.
The driver for the hard drive is also Microsoft dated 7/1/2001 version
5.1.2535.0. Searching for an updated drive was unsuccessful. I would
really like to find out how to fix this as the computer seems slower
than my old system with a 30 gig SATA I drive.

 

[Don R]

Sorry about the multiple copies of my last post.
Don