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#11
If you can give us a proper motherboard model number like this:
Gigabyte GA‑Z68X‑UD3H‑B3
The one of us can look up the drivers to see if there is a AHCI one that will work (for Intel MBs)
If it is an AMD system someone could find the correct SATA driver for that controller too.
Maybe things have changed, but at one time, this behavior meant the SATA controllers were hot-pluggable. You didn't have much of an option for changing things, unless you could turn off the hot-plug capability. If I remember correctly, you couldn't eject your system drive anyway, so it was a non-issue.
No, nothing has changed.
You are correct about the hot swapping - it is the main useful feature of the Advanced Host Controller Interface protocol (AHCI). The other main feature is Native Command Queuing but that really only benefits server applications.
So all AHCI SATA controllers are hot swap capable. But no OS will let you eject a system drive.
In general, if the motherboard's SATA controller is AHCI capable and the OS can't differentiate between a hot swap capable hard drive and and externally connected drive then you get this problem. The AHCI driver tells the OS that it must look for the hot-swap flag in the BIOS configuration or just ignore the SATA connected drive and treat it like a fixed hard drive. Most UEFI BIOS have the option to set drives as hot swappable or not, but older BIOS can have no option. The Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver handled that chore in older OS and BIOS. Newer systems just need the standalone AHCI/SATA driver.