Remove Internal Hard Drives From Safely Remove Hardware

Broken Hope · 29 Apr 2010 at 01:37

If like me you find it annoying that internal hard drives show up when you click on Safely Remove Hardware you can tell Windows to treat those drives as internal and thus they won't show up anymore.

To do this open an elevated command prompt and type the following

Code:

reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel0" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001

You can change the channel depending on how many hard drives you have installed, I had 2 installed so I had to change channel 0 and channel 1.

After rebooting your system your hard drives won't show up under Safely Remove Hardware anymore.

Philtor · 29 Apr 2010 at 09:00

Only HDD's connected via USB or eSATA should be showing under safely remove hardware tbh.

AbsenceJam · 29 Apr 2010 at 10:20

Nice tip. Although I'll stick to using HotSwap! which has this in the GUI.

philtorrens said:
Only HDD's connected via USB or eSATA should be showing under safely remove hardware tbh.

The computer can't tell which are eSATA and which aren't and it lets you swap any disk you like, which is especially useful if you have hotswap bays.

I don't think the system disk should be listed but that's it.

anything I don't mind · 29 Apr 2010 at 18:42

i always ignore that safely remove hardware completely.

i just pull usb devices out. never had any problems.

Boozebeard · 30 Apr 2010 at 01:54

I was under the impression you only needed to safely remove if you were using that ready boost feature or something.

mast3r · 30 Apr 2010 at 10:14

Safely remove. There is nothing safe about an MS Operating System.

Mikoyan · 30 Apr 2010 at 15:11

AbsenceJam said:
Nice tip. Although I'll stick to using HotSwap! which has this in the GUI.

The computer can't tell which are eSATA and which aren't and it lets you swap any disk you like, which is especially useful if you have hotswap bays.

I don't think the system disk should be listed but that's it.

Thats awesome cheers!

AbsenceJam · 1 May 2010 at 10:38

groen said:
i always ignore that safely remove hardware completely.

i just pull usb devices out. never had any problems.

This isn't about USB devices. You can remove them without issue pretty much due to the way the OS treats them. Different for disks regarded as internal.