Crap, I did not read his first post correctly. What he wants to happen is something I never pay any attention to anyway. But there is a way to do what he wants. M$ has a little paper about eSata drives and their indentification correctly. From that paper I extracted the part about modding the 'registry' to remove the incorrectly identified INTERNAL drives from the Removable drives list in the right lower system tray.
Incorrect SATA Configuration
Incorrect SATA configuration can appear in the following situations:
• If the system incorrectly identifies an internal SATA port as external, Windows disables LPM on that port and therefore cannot conserve power to the port. In addition, Windows treats the internal non-removable device that is connected to that port as a removable device. For example, it appears in the Safely Remove Device dialog box in the system tray and in Devices and Printers.
• If an external SATA port is not correctly configured, it is possible for a device that is connected to the port to be considered not removable and therefore to fail to appear in the Safely Remove Device dialog box in the system tray and in Devices and Printers.
If an internal SATA port is incorrectly configured as an external SATA port, a system vendor or administrator can correct it without updating the system BIOS or the Windows software.
To work around this problem, you can disable external SATA support on a per-channel basis by setting the value of the TreatAsInternalPort registry key to 1 and then rebooting the system.
If the system has both internal and external SATA ports, but a device that is attached to an internal SATA port appears in the Safely Remove Devices dialog box in the system tray or in Devices and Printers, you should reset the registry key for the port.
For example, if only channel 2 is an actual external SATA port, but all four SATA ports were set as external, the following commands set the ports correctly:
Code:
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel0" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel1" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel3" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
The channel numbers that Device Manager shows might not match the channel numbers in the registry. You might be required to set the value, reboot the system, and verify that the appropriate port is set correctly. For more information, see “The disk drive numbers may not correspond as expected to the SATA channel numbers when you set up Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Windows 7 on a computer that has multiple SATA or RAID disks,” which is listed in “Resources.”.
Like I said at first, the drives appearing as removable does not bother me, but there is how you work around the bother.
RGone...
EDIT:
Most motherboards that I have used are 'never' setup to recognize internal sata drives in AHCI mode the correct way for Windows to know how to set them up in the registry.
END EDIT.