sata hard drive seen as removeable drive

[sosaman]

Hi all. I've got a problem that I can't fix (although it might not be a
problem, just move of a nuisance).

Basically, I recently had to reload xp onto my friends comp, as it was
heavily infected by malware. I got everything going, installed drivers (that
I could find), and did all ms updates, and everything was fine. Towards the
end, my friend found his disk(s), for the m//b which had 2 drivers I needed.

Anyway, I'm gonna cut and paste what I posted before and have not found a
solution.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2109123859&size=o <-- (after i did
all of the ati installation, and abit driver installation this started coming
up) - is there anyway to get rid of this? basically, it's a sata drive, and i
partioned it (on os installation), and that is what you see in the pic.

(another post below)

when i reinstalled the os on my friends comp (windows xp), i had a few
things i had to overcome (link above). once i did this and that, i never had
any problems (nothing about external stuff). when i finally installed their
m/b drivers (disk he gave me) towards the end of my working on it, is when i
saw the sata drive being seen as an external drive (ie - screenshot).

it only bugged me as this was not my comp (friends), and i didn't like it.
it kinda looks like my comp, but i have the 8-1 (or whatever) memory card
reader, that starts on bootup, but i always disable it after startup. - sos

fyi, i'm not worried about it now, as i don't have the comp, but would like
to know what would fix it (if possible). - sos


I have lately seen more of this from different users, and would like to know
if anyone has dealt with this here, and/or fixed it?

 

[Touch Base]

Hi all. I've got a problem that I can't fix (although it might not be a
problem, just move of a nuisance).

<snip>

SATA drives are being identified by Windows as 'removable drives' because
technically they ARE removable drives. Part of the SATA specification is
that such drives are 'hot-swappable'and some motherboard chipset drivers
force windows to show them as such. You wouldn't be able to use that feature
of course because it is your boot drive. Some of the newer motherboards have
corrected this and SATA boot drives do not show as removeable HDD's.

I've seen it mentioned somewhere that you can turn off this notification in
the registry and I copied it from a web site [?? can't remeber which one
now] I have not tried this. Usual disclaimer applies to working in the
registry - .

Go to Start/Run type regedit

locate this folder

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\nvata (nvata64 for those using 64bit
windows)

after navigating to this folder, create a DWORD named "DisableRemovable" and
set the value to 1

restart your pc and you should notice the removable icon is no longer there,
which means windows no longer detects your SATA hard drive as a removable
device but other removeable drives will still be shown.