Safely remove my SATA drive?

[Gig-O-Ram]

When I reinstalled XP, I had my external drive hooked up so I could move my files back onto my main hdd, and like one would expect, I noticed the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the taskbar, which I thought was referring to the external - even though it was turned off at times. This is really weird - A couple days ago, I clicked the icon and found that it was reading my SATA150 as hardware I could safely remove. You might understand my confusion on this.

Don't ask me why, but during the reinstall process, I had unhooked the SATA from the board so nothing accidental would happen to it during formatting C: and installing the OS. When I got XP set up, I hooked the SATA back to the board and went on with life. But I'm wondering if having unhooked it did something to the system, making XP mistakenly see it as something I'd want to remove at some point. The drive is recognized in windows, and is accessable, but I don't know what to do about the SRH icon. I've checked in Disk MGT, Device MGR, and the drive's properties and can't seem to find anything wrong or any way to alter this. Right now in Disk MGT, the drive reads nearly full capacity with 1MB unallocated space - I don't what to say about that one, since I didn't set it up that way in the first place...

I have mostly games on that drive, and since doing the reinstall, I don't think any of them are in the new registry, so I might have to reinstall all the games anyway. Should I just reformat/partition the drive and reintegrate it into windows like I did the first time?

[polobunny]

No, lol. SATA hard drives are hot swappable, wich means you can remove them while the computer is running. This is why the icon appears. Depending on the chipset drivers you installed (or didn't install in the past) this icon might not have been there. Do not worry about it, and if you really just don't like it there I can give you a registry patch to remove it. ;)

[screwballl]

missed a keyword... SOME SATA hard drives are hot swappable. It all depends on the drive and the mobo. Some mobos support hot swappable SATA and others do not. In his case it does and he can unplug it at anytime even if windows is running. Won't hurt anything as long as windows or whatever is not accessing the drive at the time

[Gig-O-Ram]

Originally Posted by polobunny

No, lol. SATA hard drives are hot swappable, wich means you can remove them while the computer is running. This is why the icon appears. Depending on the chipset drivers you installed (or didn't install in the past) this icon might not have been there. Do not worry about it, and if you really just don't like it there I can give you a registry patch to remove it. ;)

The reason I bring it up is that I didn't have an icon in my old installation. Windows just saw it and accepted it. The chipset I installed this time was an updated one (v6.86), instead of the one from the system disc. I think I would like to remove it, so I'll take a patch...thanks!

And it does seem to be hot swappable. I tried it with no ensuing problems.