Safely removing a Safely Remove Hardware notification
I have found a fix for a niggle with the Opteron box I built last year. One of my drives is incorrectly detected as a removable device, causing the Safely Remove Hardware icon to appear in the Windows notification area:
I know for a fact that this particular WD Raptor hard drive is securely fastened inside the chassis with four screws; I installed it myself. I suppose it's removable in the strictest sense of the word, but it's certainly not what you'd normally call a removable storage device.
It looks like the SATA drivers for my nForce4-based motherboard causes Windows to believe that it is some kind of hot-swappable device, and it was by investigating the Nvidia driver files I finally found the solution. If you're experiencing the same problem with your nForce board under Windows XP or 2003 I'd expect one of these registry changes to fix it. To convince Windows to treat my SATA devices as non-removable I located the key
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\nvata64
in the registry and created a DWORD value named DisableRemovable with value 1 under it. For the 32-bit version of the Nvidia drivers, you'd create the same value under
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\nvata
Yes, I know I could have gotten rid of the notification area icon simply by instructing the taskbar to hide it. As far as I'm concerned using this taskbar feature is never a solution, it merely hides the symptoms of a problem. Besides, I still want that notification icon to appear when attaching devices that truly are removable.
5 August, 2006
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by higgins
Thanks a lot! :)
by Charles
Yeah, same opinion here about notification area
by Andy
Just what I was looking for, not some bodge but a proper fix, cheers.
by Keltix
Thanks for the Tip, it worked 100% as says. ;)
by arleas
SATA drives ARE removable drives though... I mean, not that you'd want to repeatedly yank one out and/or plug it in, but in the case where you have multiple SATA Drives (I do) you may decide you want you want to remove the drive and put it temporarily in another computer (Faster to copy files that way)... So SATA allows for hot swapping the drives...
Also, like you I've got windows 2000, and I got Age of Empires III (the full game)... turns out that the only thing preventing you from running it is the setup script... there's some kind of thing in there that looks for windows XP and then stops the install if you don't have it...
To install AoE3 without Windows XP:
* Start > Run...
* Type in cmd and press OK
* When the DOS window appears type in the drive you put the disc in; for example, 'D:'.
* Type in setup /a and press enter.
* Wait for the installation wizard to appear, and press 'next'.
* Type in the destination as to where you want it to be installed.Default: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age Of Empires 3
* Press Install.
unfortunately this doesn't give you the registry entries, but you can play the game just fine without them... I think it only interferes with online gameplay (which I didn't care about)...
by trapper
Awesome, thanks for the fix!! I've tried a few other Google hits on this topic, but nothing provided a true solution, only workarounds. Cheers!!
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by fff
great thanks