QUESTION :
I have 3 SATA drives – 1 SSD and 2 common HDDs. After changing HDD controller mode to AHCI and installing Windows 7, I still have choice to safely remove HW devices – disks. Every time I’m going to remove USB flash card I worry that I accidentally turn off system drive (is it even possible?). Is it possible to turn off this feature for those 3 HDDs?
ANSWER :
Not sure if this method can be adapted to non USB devices. Disk drives should show up under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetEnumIDE
.
This can be achieved by modifying a registry value. So far
I had no time writing a little tool for this…Devices are shown there if they are marked as removable and
if they do no have the ‘surprise removal ok’ flag. These are
bit coded flags:From cfgmgr32.h:
The device capabilities are found in the registry in a value
named ‘Capabilities’ under (sample for one of my USB flash
drives):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetEnumUSBVid_058f&Pid_6331 58F091111BIf you take away 4 from the value or add 80h and then
refresh the save removal dialog by toggeling the checkbox,
then the drive is gone.
But the value is reset when you attach the drive for the
next time. This is hard coded into the driver and read
each time the drive is loaded. If you export the modified
value an reg file then you can silently load it on startup
by
regedit /s hidecardreader.regThe device id string of your card reader (this
Vid_058f&Pid_6331 58F091111B thing) is found in the properties
of the USB device in the device manager. My ListUsbDrives
tool shows it too (the ‘Ctrl DevID’):
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/listusbdrives.zip