Hard Drives showing up as removable

[AwesomeJay]

just installed windows xp on my MSI K8N Neo 2 and my 160GB SATA drive is under HARD DRIVES in the device manager but in the system tray i have the "safely remove hardware" icon and it shows the hard drive.. is this normal on this board? or did i miss a setting in the bios or something

 

[ssvegeta1010]

Yes, this is normal. Windows does this because SATA is hot-swappable.

 

[dtboos]

Yup. Its very handy. I have 2x 5.25" bay Hard Drive kits that I hot swap all the time. Its VERY VERY nice not having to powerdown like I used to.

 

[buleyb]

I would assume the 160GB SATA drive isn't your root drive though, as that shouldn't be hot swappable without a hardware raid setup...

just curious

 

[dtboos]

Well, you COULD hot swap it, but its not recommended that you swap out your OS harddrive of coarse. Since you would create alot of problems with windows for abrupt "shutdowns", and of coarse when you took it out, you would no longer have a computer interface.

 

[buleyb]

that's my point, and Windows 2k/XP/03 are supposed to have protection from that. With hardware RAID masking the drive configuration, it wouldn't matter. I'm curious if Windows can see beyond some RAID chips and allow a software interface to shutdown part of the array.