This is a custom built computer running Vista Ultimate. Athlon x2 BE 2400 processor, Gigabyte GA-M16P-S3 AM/2 MotherBoard (w/nVidia Chipset), 2 GB DDR2 RAM, Seagate Barracuda SATA drive. After a fresh install of Vista, I downloaded and installed all available Microsoft updates. I noticed there were a couple nVidia drivers on the list, and one of them was for the SATA controller. After the updates installed and I rebooted, I noticed the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the Task Bar. It has my hard drive listed as a SCSI disk device, and gives the option to stop the drive, which I obviously don’t want to do. Is there a way I can prevent my drive from showing in the Safely Remove Hardware box?

Yes there indeed is a way - with a caveat. Read the entire thread below including the links to other threads that dealt with the same issue. At the end I think you would agree with me that the tradeoff (caveat) won't be worth it. http://www.computing.net/windowsvis... i_Xp/VistaUser

Well your probably right except that I'm concerned that it would not be too difficult to accidently remove the ata drive when attempting to remove a different drive. Anyways I tried the procedure and it did not work (the ata drive was still listed in Safely Remove Hardware). Thanks.

Click it and see what happens. You might just get an error "can't remove the drive as it is in use" every time.        My blog