DVD drive showing up in Safely Remove Hardware

Forum Storage : CD/DVD Writers DVD drive showing up in Safely Remove Hardware

I just got a new Toshiba M640 and for some reason, the DVD burner shows up in the Safely Remove Hardware icon with my external hard drives and thumb drives. While it's not that big a deal, I have occasionally unmounted it and needed to reboot my computer to even open the drive.

The drive is a HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GT30N. Thanks in advance.

Reply to djwhack03

This is normal for laptops, I think every laptop I have seen shows the optical drive in that icon.

Reply to hang-the-9

If you're running Windows 7 then check out this Microsoft paper - it describes how to configure the devices on your SATA ports as "removable" or not:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devi [...] eSATA.mspx

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to sminlal

sminlal wrote :

That's an interesting paper, but it's made for system builders designing chipsets, not end-users.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to hang-the-9

I'm running Win7 but is there a tl;dr (too long didn't read) version of that paper? I'm not exactly the most tech savvy person.

Reply to djwhack03

Don't worry about that white paper, I took a peek at it, and it's geared towards people that design systems not consumers.

Just be carefull what you remove using the hardware remove wizard.

Reply to hang-the-9

hang-the-9 wrote :

That's an interesting paper, but it's made for system builders designing chipsets, not end-users.

The section titled "Incorrect SATA Configuration" gives the registry settings needed to configure SATA ports as internal - if you apply those settings then the device attached to that SATA port will no longer be considered to be "removable" and it won't show up in the "Safely Remove Drives" icon.

Reply to sminlal

I tried entering the following command given in that paper into the command line for different channel numbers, but it does not fix anything. Do I need to change the name of any of the folders to get it to work?

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

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to djwhack03

djwhack03 wrote :

Looks like you have to know what port the drive is on, and change that one.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to hang-the-9

hang-the-9 wrote :

Looks like you have to know what port the drive is on, and change that one.

I'm sorry if the answer to this question is simple, but how do I find that out?

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to djwhack03

djwhack03 wrote :

I'm sorry if the answer to this question is simple, but how do I find that out?

- Start -> right-click "Computer", click "Manager" -> click "Device Manager" in the left pane

- Open up the "Disk drives" (or in your case, "DVD/CD-ROM Drives" ) section in the right pane

- Right-click on the disk drive in question and select "Properties"

- Under the "General" tab, look at the "Location" field for the "Channel" number.

Note that you'll have to reboot your system before the change will take effect.

Message edited by sminlal on 08-04-2010 at 09:48:09 PM

Reply to sminlal

Ask the community Add a reply

Related content

See all topics related to "DVD drive showing up in Safely Remove Hardware"

Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > CD/DVD Writers > DVD drive showing up in Safely Remove Hardware

Go to:

Help |
Forum rules

There are 1524 identified and unidentified users. To see the list of identified users, Click here.

Page generated in 0.736 seconds

Please mind

You are about to answer a thread that has been inactive for more than 6 months.
If you still wish to proceed, please ensure that your posting is original and does not duplicate or overlap any prior responses to this thread.

Add a reply Cancel