Safely Remove Hardware Icon Won't Go Away

[Pez D Spencer]

I just built a new system with an A8N32-SLI mobo. After installing XP Pro I now have the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in my taskbar and it wont go away. It has my SATA hard drive listed when I click on it. I read that if you have an external hard drive then this icon will appear but my hard drive is internal.

I had this hard drive installed in my old system and never had this icon come up. Why is it there now and how do I get rid of it?

Thanks.

 

[Robor]

Yep, it's normal for a SATA drive to be in there.

 

[Pez D Spencer]

But I had this drive in my old computer and the icon never showed up.

 

[jlbenedict]

SATA drives are "hot swappable".


Also, your old computer might not have had "native" SATA support with Windows XP built-in drivers.

 

[John]

SATA is capable of hot swapping. You can disable the icon by going to taskbar and start menu properties > customize > safely remove hardware & always hide.

 

[xtknight]

I don't know how I got rid of mine but I have two SATA drives and it doesn't show up anymore. Maybe it's because I didn't install the NVIDIA IDE drivers.

 

[jlbenedict]

Originally posted by: xtknight
I don't know how I got rid of mine but I have two SATA drives and it doesn't show up anymore. Maybe it's because I didn't install the NVIDIA IDE drivers.

Thats another very valid scenerio.
I know on a clean install of XP on my AN8 SLI I do not have the icon until I install the SATA drivers (I leave out the IDE drivers).

 

[xtknight]

It's likely the NVIDIA drivers set a hot-plug-supported flag and Windows shows that icon. Avoid installing them because among being annoying, they can also cause data corruption if you're one of the unlucky poor souls who enabled NCQ on the wrong hard disk.