Hard drives viewed as external

[whirlednews]

For some reason, Windows seems to view all of my hard drives as external, in right hand corner of the task bar there is the little icon with a green deal on it and when i click on that it shows all of my local disks individually and gives me the option to "eject" them.

I recently installed a new SSD and when I did I switched the SATA settings in the BIOS to AHCI from IDE before I installed windows 7.

Does anyone know why this would happen?

Thanks

 

[whirlednews]

No one has any idea as to why it would show my drives there and give me the option to eject them?

I have not tried to "eject" one of them yet because it just doesn't seem like something I want to do but maybe I should just so I can see what happens...

 

[Jonmor68]

I can't tell you why this happens, whether it's the change to AHCI that causes it.
I can tell you it's not W7 as I have seen others with this problem in Vista.
You will not be able to eject any drive containing the OS files, as Windows can't remove itself.
You could try changing the settings back in bios and see if it returns back to normal.

 

[whirlednews]

Did some more searching and found someone from years ago wondering the same thing. Turns out that SATAII hard drives supports hot plug, and so does the SATAII controller, so with this you can dismount the hard drives without powering down the system.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/196553-32-hardware-safely-remove-hard-disk