Hard drive is in the Safely Remove Hardware tab

[jquin3]

Hi, is it normal to see your internal hard drive in the "Safely remove hardware" tab in the taskbar? I know it only comes out when you connect a device in the USB port. Everytime I start Windows XP its always there. Is it safe if I remove my hard drive from there?

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

What happens if you click it? Do you have more than one hard drive?

[patio]

This is definitely not normal....what happened prior to this ? ?

If you select remove you may risk losing your data.

Do you have a real XP CD to do a repair install ? ?

[jquin3]

The pc was handed down to me by a friend. Its been like that since I got it. It only has one SATA hard drive that is partitioned into 2. I really dont want to risk removing it from the tab. Do you think I should reinstall XP?

[DeltaSlaya]

To my knowledge this is normal for a SATA HDD in XP. I currently have vista but when I had XP (on the PC in sig) this happened. It is because the motherboard supports SATA plug and go or something like that. XP does not realise that you don't really want to remove the system drive as this feature came out after XP. I don't recommend reinstalling because it's not a problem and it probably wont change anything and I just hid that notification item.

There may be BIOS settings that address this though.

[patio]

To my knowledge this is normal for a SATA HDD

Only if the MBoard or the SATA controller card in that machine supports hot-swapping SATA drives...

Did you get any documentation with this machine ? ?

[jquin3]

The computer was actually built by my friend. The motherboard he used was MSI K8N Diamond Plus. I havent checked if it supports swappable SATA drives. If you dont think that this is actually a problem then its a great relief. I really dont wanna reinstall XP. I'm just concerned that I might accidentally remove it.

[DeltaSlaya]

The computer was actually built by my friend. The motherboard he used was MSI K8N Diamond Plus. I havent checked if it supports swappable SATA drives. If you dont think that this is actually a problem then its a great relief. I really dont wanna reinstall XP. I'm just concerned that I might accidentally remove it.

Yes it's not a problem and to actually remove a drive you first have to open the dialog, select device, press stop and confirm. Not something you can do accidentally.

[patio]

If the board/controller installed supports it....again if this is not the case he may have some other serious issues...

[CBMatt]

The computer was actually built by my friend. The motherboard he used was MSI K8N Diamond Plus. I havent checked if it supports swappable SATA drives. If you dont think that this is actually a problem then its a great relief. I really dont wanna reinstall XP. I'm just concerned that I might accidentally remove it.

Yes it's not a problem and to actually remove a drive you first have to open the dialog, select device, press stop and confirm. Not something you can do accidentally.

Not necessarily true.  That's if you right-click on the Safely Remove Hardware icon.  If you left-click, it will let you choose the hardware through a different menu.  Check out my attached image; this is very easy to do by accident.

[cleaning up - attachment deleted by admin]

[DeltaSlaya]

The computer was actually built by my friend. The motherboard he used was MSI K8N Diamond Plus. I havent checked if it supports swappable SATA drives. If you dont think that this is actually a problem then its a great relief. I really dont wanna reinstall XP. I'm just concerned that I might accidentally remove it.

Yes it's not a problem and to actually remove a drive you first have to open the dialog, select device, press stop and confirm. Not something you can do accidentally.

Not necessarily true.  That's if you right-click on the Safely Remove Hardware icon.  If you left-click, it will let you choose the hardware through a different menu.  Check out my attached image; this is very easy to do by accident.

Sorry for misinformation, I was not aware it could be done so easily.

[patio]

What's on Drive K: Chris ? ?

[CBMatt]

It's just a flash drive with all of my music CD's backed up on it.