Hardware saying I can safely remove Hard disk?

[Manson_666]

I just finished putting my first computer build together today, every thing went slick, but down in the task bar it's saying I can safely remove hardware, and that hardware is my Western Digital 320gig Sata II harddrive... I made it into 3 partitions and it says to safely remove all 3... if I just do it will it disable the harddrive or is there a way to get rid of prompt?

 

[maury73]

SATA allows natively for hot-swap, like SCSI-2+.
Obvioulsy you can't disable your OS drive ad there is no need to do so if you don't have an hot-swap drive bay.
You can hide the safe removal icon through the task bar context menu, but it's better to leave it because it serves for disabling USB drives too and it's always a good practice to diable USB flash keys before removing.

 

[VTOLfreak]

Your SATAII hard drive supports hot plug. And so does your SATAII controller.
So Windows gives you the "Remove hardware" dialog to "dismount" the drive.
Problem is that if your OS is on the drive Windows will either give you a warning if you try it or it will do it anyway and crash.
(I don't have a system on hand here that supports it so I can't try it out. Anyone? )

If this isn't a problem (OS and pagefile on another drive) you can use this to turn off the hard drive and remove it WHILE your system is running.
(Hence the name "hot plug".)
You can also add SATAII drives without turning your box off.
(Use the Windows storage manager to make partitions and assing drive letters or or it won't show in My Computer.)

As far as I know there is no way to turn of this feature. Maybe some registry hack?
But you should be carefull not to disable this feature systemwide.
Some MP3 players and other USB/firewire stuff need you to manually dismount them before pulling the cable out.
(My Creative Muvo HD-based MP3 player is an example)

One more note:
Windows is smart enough to not use thesame drive letter for multiple partitions.
So if you happen to stick in a drive with a partition letter already in use it will shift it to the next free letter.
(Handy when you need to salvage someone's data when their box won't boot anymore. )

[EDIT] Someone beat me to it, I type too slow

 

[mabaty]

What mother board?? I would highly reccomend updating your chipset drivers...

 

[Manson_666]

Asus M2N-E

Now I got a real problem, when I boot up (after I installed the catalyst drivers off the cd I got with my X1800XL) I either get a blank screen/red vertical lines/green vertical lines. Now before I installed those drivers it booted up every time... Maybe they need a new update from the ATI site?

EDIT: K scratch the problem of the videocard, they were the drivers :L
I am gonna reformat the harddrive again any way, my partitions are screwed up... it installed windows on letter E :S when I wanted it on C etc...

 

[aj49]

I have a ASUS P5N32SLI-Deluxe w/ Mitsumi Floppy/7-in-1 card reader that shows up as (2) USB drives. A while ago when I was using a SD card, I wanted to remove it & it didnt list the SD card seperately, just the Mitsumi (as USB drive H,I TOGETHER). After getting no answer from MCS, I had a bad feeling about it but I hit remove drive H,I to get the SD card out. Windows got very unhappy, crashed totally & I basically had to entirely reinstall XP Pro. MCS said that nVidia chips have a "problem" w/ the remove function & their lame answer was to wait until the card was finished & just pull it out -- not a good answer. Wondering if anyone else knows a way.

 

[Manson_666]

Ok, so I formatted all over again, new install of windows. I put the Nvidia chipset disk in (the one that came with the motherboard.) There were 3 things to install (that were optional) when I was updating the chipset drivers, I installed 2 of the 3, the third one I didnt install which was a Harddrive Driver, now I installed the first install of windows, and I got the safely remove your harddisk. Now, since I didn't install that harddisk driver, I am not getting that on the second windows install. It must have to be with that driver, and, yes, my harddrive is working excellent:!: