Hmmm, can't say I've ever heard of this problem. Did you check the jumpers to make sure one is set as the master?

I agree. I've heard of this happening once before and the user had the HDD jumpers set to cable select. Worth a check.

I've always had a problem with cable select. I feel it's a waste of processing power to have the motherboard or OS have to second guess what a HD is in the first place. Just tell it, "You are a slave! Mwahaha!."

jumper settings haven't been changed since the drives were in the old computer. Not that there are any jumpers to begin with.

I should mention the drives are all SATA.

It's just because the drives are Sata. Sata can be connected / disconnected anytime, so that's why you see the drives as removable devices. I'm afraid you cannot do much about it. And also some MBs do that(usually boards for AMD and some older boards for Intel), some don't (MSI 975X Plat. PowerUp.).

0.o Holy crap.. That's scary. Never heard of that problem in my many years of setting up systems. I doubt this will do anything because they are your system drives, but I would suggest physically unplugging your drives once you're powered down, power back up and let your bois bitch at you, shut down and plug the drives back in, and reboot again. Windows -might- try to reinstall the drivers for it. I know that's the case with a lot of other hardware.

Yeesh.. Good luck.

Windows succesfully installed the drivers for these drives already and I think that might have something to do with it. I've seen some stuff online on how to make a harddrive appear removable but not vice versa. I'll do some more research.

At least I managed to find the disk management tool and set up my RAID array.

I was talking with my bro who is a lot more knowledgeable about such things, and he said that windows has enough safe-guards in place that it would never left you actually remove the drive, and if for some reason it did, it would safely park it and windows would just freeze. When you restarted it would be fine. But it's 99% sure it would just give you a "this drive is in use, try again later" error.

Still creepy.

If there are Western Digital HD's you can check diagnostics on data lifegaurd tools if I remember correctly.

Beyond that I would try Smokescale's solution and then post another message here

Are you getting any reoccuring errors in your System Event log?

r-click my computer / Manage / Event Viewer / System

Wait... is this P-ATA or Serial ATA hardware? What chipset are you using, and are you using a PCI-based drive controller, or the motherboard's built-in ports?

They're SATA hardware and the motherboard is a P5N-E Nvidia nforce 650i SLI. How can I tell if I'm using PCI based controller or built in? Though I'm thinking it's pci since that's how they appeared in the device manager prior to being recognized by windows.

I was referring to an extra PCI card [to handle RAID]. Some manufactureres do that, and it can be a pain.

As for the PCI bus, that's a hardware standard, so some things will show up in the device manager as PCI devices, even though they are built into the motherboard, instead of being on a PCI daughtercard.

S-ATA [sometimes] supports hot-swapping while the power is on, so I suppose the nForce drivers cut a corner and recognize all S-ATA drives as removable. That's kind of dumb.

I've seen this happen with a couple computers I've built after I've installed the nForce chipset drivers. You cannot remove the drive on that list, windows will say it's in use or not allowed (i did it as a test to be sure once). I couldn't fix it and just left it alone and the system has worked perfectly fine.

It has something to do with the nForce SATA drivers, from what I can tell.

hehe didn't read your post before I posted :P

Well I suppose as long as it's not a threat I can just hide the icon.

Did some research for myself and it seems that there is no way to remove it from the list, other then to suppress the Safely remove hardware thing for all devices associated to the controller, which is not necessarily a good thing.

The reason it is doing it is because the SATA specifications support hot-swappable drives (ie. plug-and-play) and windows sees them as such. However, because they are a boot device windows will not allow you to 'safely remove them' because that is... well.. unsafe =p

I can't find a fix for it now (nor could I 6 months ago when I built the other computer) on the nVidia forums, so I guess you're stuck with it. Just auto-hide the icon if it annoys you.

It's only an nForce thing only, since my intel chipset doesn't do it, so it's the drivers to blaim more then the spec. Forgot to mention that.

I found reference to the problem, it seems the nforce drivers are to blame. Now I just wonder how to fix it, I'll try updated drivers in the meantime and see if that helps.

Try fucking around with oyur mainframe bios a bit. You can't nscrew up oyur computer by doing that no matter how much you do (even though my horrible termonology isn't helping the ordel one bit).

When dealing with SATA, you have to make sure that the motherboards' SATA drivers were installed when you first installed the system. Those SATA drivers should come into effect right after the BIOS has finished its initial tests on HD and RAM and all that.

I know only because my main system boots off a 10k RPM SATA drive and I had to jump through some hoops to get it to boot right.

Oh cool, that clears a lot up. Windows is perpetually bugging me to "safely remove" my removable storage drives for months now. I'd upgrade my Forceware drivers, but out of the two dozen versions I've tried, 84.25 is the only one that'll play videos and not give me a blue screen of death. It's always something.

remove the driver in the device list ( of the sATA drives ) and then let it autodetect again
it has happened with a DVDROM when the windows driver (PATA) got corrupted.

remember to DONT REINSTALL or you will destroy your array.
just remove the driver from the device list ( remove hardware ) and dont restart, inmediately go to autodetect and let it reinstall it.

backup everything just in case, cause there is a small posibility that you will lose your array too..

format the computer but back up the stuff on it first thus when you back format it and re install your OS it should find it as hardware and keep it that way

I have a SATA drive and have half of your problem. It shows up in the Hard Disk location on My Computer (yay) but also show up under the Remove Hardware list (which is normal for SATAs anyway).

I'm using SATA on an Asus A8N-SLI nForce 4 series mobo and all of my drives detect as fixed, but also detect in the "safely remove hardware" in Windows. In my case two drives are Windows boot using RAID0 and the other two (a total of four 250GB drives) are used in a Logical Volume Manager set up for Fedora Core 6 Linux.

Unfortunately (fortunately?) the standard of sata drives is that they are hot swappable and thusly show up as removable. The thing that strikes me is I have the 680i but mine don't, only usb drives show up as removable. There is a registry edit that may help you if you know how.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Services nvata

add variable DWORD DisableRemovable and set it to "1" then restart

Having an nvidia board like you I'd also have to mention that nvidia has very flaky support for sata drives and they've become a huge hassle on the 680i motherboards, so far no problems here and hopefully same goes for you.

Ok, apparently FA decided to randomly remove slashes.

"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\nvata"

And... I officially give up, maybe it's just me.