On my laptop only my sd card and USB flash thumb drive show as removable devices, but on my newly installed 14393.693 desktop, all except my System and Boot drive volumes now show up in Device Manager as Portable Devices, even though they are just partitions on my 2 hard drives.
Is this very unusual, or does it happen from time to time for others?
MBR BIOS only - they are just partitions on 2 HDDs, so no more swappable than the boot and system volumes, on one of the 2 disks
Just used Disk manager to shrink one partition by 30GB and created a new volume (m: Nova), which does not show as a portable device after scanning for hardware changes in devmgmt:
weird.
It's no great problem, just odd. I'll check out the Motherboard & storage drivers, it may not have the full set, as I only have had the machine for a couple of days, (as a dumped machine in need of employment and am still working it out.) Probably when I lose the MS Generics and apply proper Intel drivers it will look different.
Almost always, internal hard drives showing up as removable drives is caused by the AHCI SATA driver (or lack of a compatible driver).
Modern motherboards can be hot swap capable, which means the AHCI SATA Driver must be able to communicate to Windows the special identifiers that tell it "This is an internal, (potentially) hot swappable drive", not a typical removable drive.
Changing the Hot Swap settings in UEFI/BIOS will not fix the behavior as the SATA controller is still potentially hot swap capable under AHCI standards.
Normally, the behavior can be fixed by installing the motherboard manufacturer's proprietary AHCI SATA Driver.
But today many manufacturers rely on 3rd party drivers. Intel systems often rely on the IRST Driver.
Careful with IRST Drivers. Annoyingly, there are many versions of them and they must be compatible with your motherboard. Always best to use the one offered by the manufacturer.
Keep in mind that common registry tweaks are just workarounds. They don't solve the behavior, just hide it.
Which is fine if it works for you, as this is not a performance problem.
Thanks for that wisdom TV2.
I have just returned here after downloading and installing the Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3V (rev1.0) drivers for the onboard devices, including IRST, as I hinted I was going to do in my previous post.
Yep - they seem to have fixed the Device Manager misreporting Removable drives - and I plugged in a Sandisk Cruser blade for good measure:
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