Windows 7 Allows me to Eject the C Drive???

Hey,

So i just upgraded to 7 and under the icon for "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" it allows me to select my main C hardrive..... Is this normal and can i remove that from the list? Obviously this is not something i would want to do or even play around with.

Tom

 

What the heck. What happens if you do eject it? That's not normal I think. Check Disk Management in Computer Management and see if there's anything odd.

 

Sounds like you have the driver installed for AHCI or AHCI is enabled in the BIOS.

 

Im not going to eject it and find out.

About the driver and BIOS thing can you maybe say a little more as im a BIOS newb.

Thanks

 

I wonder what would happen if you did eject your harddrive.

 

Most of the time AHCI is used for RAID setups, but you can usually disable it in the BIOS. I know you can on most Dell's but I don't know about HP's. What drivers did you install when you upgraded to Win7?

 

Never heard of AHCI being a cause of this before.

I would not disable it: there is something else going on.

(AHCI enables a HD's NCQ algorithm to work, making it much faster).

 

Yes, NCQ being Native Command Queuing. But AHCI has two modes on Intel Boards. One being the normal mode, which also supports NCQ or the AHCI RAID vendor specific mode... do you have the Intel Matrix Storage app installed?

 

Yeah, because that's certainly going to leave the OS up and running as it should.

It would probably instantly bluescreen, or just go the "Please insert boot disk" menu just after start up, or most likely just a blank black screen.

Anyway, it's something to do with the whole AHCI thing, I've seen this happen in numerous other topics.

 

That's not a bad thing. AHCI is what allows actual SATA communication rather than the SATA working in a "legacy" IDE emulation mode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you read that article it says that there are 3 modes. Legacy IDE, Standard AHCI, then AHCI RAID. I think he's on the RAID mode. In standard AHCI mode it doesn't support RAID or hot-swapping drives but handles SATA communication and NCQ natively.

BTW... to the OP, as the other guys said.. I wouldn't mess with that option if you're not prepared for problems.

 

ahci allows (if the system allows it) disk hotswapping. it might be this triggering the weird behaviour.

and yes, i would try to eject it i love to try out such stuff to see how it fails, then

 

the DVD drive will open with the hard disk sitting on top of it. The HDD will then sit up, stretch its arms and yawn, look unhappily at you, ask you never to do that again and push itself back into the laptop via the DVD drive.

 

Im at work not so i cant try anything. As for as Disk management everything looks fine in there.

I havent really installed any HP drivers as Win 7 found almost everything i needed to get up and running.

Here are the Win 7 (64 bit) drivers for my machine. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=4063&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&product=3860525
Anything i may need to solve this? Thanks.

 

Yea im not familiar with BIOS so its not something i feel comfortable playing with unless some just says "go in and change this." That i can do but as far troubleshooting in it, no dice.

 

I don't think there's an option in the BIOS to enable ACHI or whatever but i would love if it did... anyways Twism86 , which BIOS version are u using? I'm using F21..

 

Not to sounds dumb but how do i know this. Im at work now so i probably cant answer until i get home anyway.

 

it should show you when the laptop posts, or you can check using CPU-Z

 

I have seen that on a desktop, it is nothing serious and or major, because it will fail anyways, anyhow that seemed cool to me...

 

When you look in the device manager what ICH version is your board? 5,6,7,8,9,10?

*This* is the driver software for the Matrix Storage Manager from Intel on 32/64-bit Windows 7. It supports all Mobile 4, and 5 series chipsets, as well as all Mobile 945 and 965 series chipsets. It provides genuine drivers for AHCI support. Also, you can try updating your chipset drivers themselves, seeing as how you just installed a new version of Windows. It's been a while but I remember this hapening on a notebook I worked on once, and one of the drivers I installed fixed this (or at least hid it from the user, since you're obviously not using RAID).

 

Ok well it seems i have a series 4 chipset. I guess ill try that first one then.

 

In my experience, the computer often continues to run just fine after you eject the hard drive - until it needs to access the hard drive. Then it freezes until you re-insert the hard drive (can't recall if I could move the cursor around or not - I think I could), and once the hard drive has powered up, it returns to normal activity.

Note that my experiments involve physically ejecting the hard drive, not doing so from within Windows.

The behavior does make some sense, as the computer essentially is waiting for a hard drive read or write to finish, but instead of the standard 0.015 seconds for that to finish, it takes however long it is until the hard drive is back and connected. It's the same sort of delay that users of early JMicron SSDs saw when their SSD controllers took half a second to make a random write.

I wouldn't recommend messing around with this too much without proper backups, of course. I'm kind of like davepermen, in that I'm curious what will happen if things aren't as traditional thinking says they should be, hence my experiments with this awhile back. Now I'm somewhat curious what would happen if a different HDD were put back in - and I suspect they wouldn't be nearly as calamity-free as putting back in the same hard drive that was initially ejected.

 

Well then now I have to do it!

 

Finally got home to my Win7 desktop. It just complains that the drive is currently in use, close any programs using it (which won't happen while Windows is on...) and try again. So... it's just because MS is simply enumerating all the devices on the AHCI bus. No biggie, you can't screw up your computer with it. No way, no how.

 

The funniest part of this thread is that people think Windows would be dumb enough to actually let you eject the C: drive.

This issue is nothing new - it's existed since the day SATA hot swapping was invented. My old Windows XP computer also allows me to try and ""eject" the C drive under Safely Remove Hardware. Frankly, I'm surprised that so few people have seen it.

 

That's just it though. It bothers people when they see it, and if they're not using a RAID setup they really shouldn't see it in the first place IMO. I know it doesn't do anything but to people who haven't the foggiest idea about SATA and AHCI and the like, are thinking that's a problem..

 

I have the same "problem". Anyway, I don't have RAID but I have AHCI enabled and saw that after I installed my Core i5 661 setup.

Well here's what it says after I click on it:



So you can't really eject the drive. It shows both of my drives like that though.

 

Thanks for the replies. Im really to lazy and dont know enough to fix it.

 

There's no "fixing" to do. It's working exactly how it's designed to work.

 

Well in XP I remember you being able to format tha primary/booted partition/HDD. Was pretty funny as half way through it would realize (in the family guy voice) "Oh nooooo I formatted myself" and promptly fail.

 

No you can't. It won't even let you start.

Back in the past when I knew less about computers, I tried this many many times hoping that it would actually work. It never did.

 

Push The Button! Push The Button!

 

how about in device manager > processors > uninstall?
have anyone tried it ?

 

I think if you disable write caching for your HDD, the option will dissapear.

 

It does the same thing to me, but after I install the HD driver for 7, it disappears.