Hard disk displayed as removal drive after updating vista

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Guest

Hello everyone,

Something strange seems to be happening after I updated Windows yesterday. I
have the home basic version.

My hard disk is being displayed as a removal drive. There is the icon
"Safely Remove Hardware" in the system tray now.

Is this normal?

Mervyn.
 
In message <[email protected]> Mervyn
Hello everyone,

Something strange seems to be happening after I updated Windows yesterday. I
have the home basic version.

My hard disk is being displayed as a removal drive. There is the icon
"Safely Remove Hardware" in the system tray now.

Is this normal?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure about "normal", but I've seen it under both XP and Vista,
depending on the type of drive controller.
 
Hi if your drive is a sata drive and uses the proper controler it is normal
for it to show up like this
Hope this helps
Ken
 
In message <[email protected]> KenM
Hi if your drive is a sata drive and uses the proper controler it is normal
for it to show up like this
Click to expand...

That isn't entirely true -- It looks like it depends on whether the SATA
controller thinks it's a SATA or eSATA (Although that's just a guess)

My two current machines (One desktop, one laptop, pure SATA) don't show
any removeable SATA drives unless I plug in an external eSATA.
 
The same thing just started happening to my machine; I'm using Vista
Ultimate. I've been wrestling with an Acomdata Drive Enclosure for a few
weeks now, trying to use my old hard drive as a mass storage device and
recover a few personal files--the enclosure would work with Vista for awhile,
then suddenly stop working. The last time I tried to get the enclosure to
work, I tried assigning it a new drive letter: K. That didn't change the
situation, and now my C and D drives are suddenly appearing as removable
storage devices. I'm worried I'm going to accidently click on them when I try
to unmount my flash drive. (Oh, and the hard drive in the enclosure still
shows at start up, via the safe removal icon, as a kind of phantom USB mass
storage device, even though the device isn't plugged in.)

Everything else seems to be working fine. Should I worry about this?

Take care,
Andrew (I'm using my partner's Windows account)
 
Andrew said:
The same thing just started happening to my machine; I'm using Vista
Ultimate. I've been wrestling with an Acomdata Drive Enclosure for a few
weeks now, trying to use my old hard drive as a mass storage device and
recover a few personal files--the enclosure would work with Vista for awhile,
then suddenly stop working. The last time I tried to get the enclosure to
work, I tried assigning it a new drive letter: K. That didn't change the
situation, and now my C and D drives are suddenly appearing as removable
storage devices. I'm worried I'm going to accidently click on them when I try
to unmount my flash drive. (Oh, and the hard drive in the enclosure still
shows at start up, via the safe removal icon, as a kind of phantom USB mass
storage device, even though the device isn't plugged in.)

Everything else seems to be working fine. Should I worry about this?

Take care,
Andrew (I'm using my partner's Windows account)
Click to expand...
I've got exactly the same problem as both posters. Anyone know if this
could have been caused by an update and if so which one?
Nick
 
Well, from what I've learned:

1. Do not use "safely remove" with flash drives. Simply give them a moment
after using them, and then unplug them.

2. Windows shows SATA drives in the "safely remove" because it is
translating them. Since you are going to shut down before removing them in
any event, there is no practical use for their appearance in "safely remove"
from a our standpoint.

3 Just ignore both conditions.

I don't know about the drive in the enclosure, but unless you changed it's
attributes to allow delayed writing, not the default, you can remove it the
same as above. Safely Remove would be used if it were using delayed write,
which mine do since I am on an uninterruptable power supply to avoid
possible data loss from delayed write. If any running software is using any
of these devices, you can't "safely remove" them anyway.

I hope this helps.
 
Hi again,

I found a quick fix for our shared problem in another Hardware & Devices
thread. I had (foolishly) downloaded an optional NVIDIA-related update,
because a different hardware discussion led me to believe it might help fix
the problems I was having with the hard drive enclosure; it didn't--why would
it?

Anyway, the NVIDIA update was causing the C drive to show up through the
Safe Removal icon. To get rid of it, the other thread recommended rolling
back the NVIDIA SATA driver to a previous version and rebooting.

Now if only I could figure out why my HD enclosure is still showing up in
the same place, even though it's been disabled, uninstalled and completely
disconnected . . .

Hope that helps,
Andrew
 
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