Hi All,

I have

• win 7 x64 Home Prem.
• The HDD is a seagate barracuda, 7200.7 ST3120827AS. 3.5", Serial: 3ms006n6, Firmware: 3.42 (no further updates)
• NexStar CX External case (drivers installed).

I have three drives:

• WD320 with OS installed
• WD750 data storage (internal)
• seagate 120 (external) - connected via esata board connected to sata on motherboard (MSI p43 neo)

Tried uninstalling HDD in device manager to no effect. Also the internal WD750 is detected as an external drive and win taskbar icon allows for it to be ejected (unlike the seagate).

All drives are configured - Online, Simple, Basic, NTFS, Active, Primary Partition (except c drive).

The seagate was previously used as a primary disk with XP operating system so I deleted the volume and created/reformatted (not quick). HDD is no longer "Active". But did not fix problem.

Background

• Originally, I installed win 7 with the bios set to IDE and forgot to install the chipset drivers. Then I changed win 7 to install the AHCI drivers, changed the bios to AHCI and rebooted. Win 7 loaded drivers but WD HDD gave problems/crashed. I installed chipset drivers and latest intell storage matrix software thingie (in safe mode). Everything worked fine after that except for the problem of not corrrectly detecting the external drive]

I have noticed that under the driver properties (and similarly in the registry) the two drives are configured differently (e.g. in driver details property capabilities for the WD the value is set to 0000006, CM_DEVCAP_REMOVABLE & EJECTSUPPORTED - whereas the seagate shows 0000080 & CM_DEVCAP_SURPRISEREMOVALOK).

Any easy way to configure things? I tried physically swapping the sata connections on the mainboard without success

So far I have found that a solution to my problem might be to perform some reg changes:

http://superuser.com/questions/12955/how-do-i-remove-the-option-to-eject-sata-drives-from-the-windows-7-tray-icon