Everytime I boot the PC up, "Safely Remove Hardware" shows up in the system tray. The only things that are in there to remove are my Seagate Barracudas configured in RAID. Thus, they shouldn't be there in the first place as it could cause major problems if I did remove them.

Is there anyway to tell the computer that those are not removable storage or get rid of that little app altogether?

I get the same thing on my 'cudas in RAID. It is giving you that because SATA is hot-swappable. So, if you did tell it to stop, you probably could pull it out of your comptuer, and put it back in later, while the computer is still running. You are not supposed to do this with system drives, however, but I bet if you didn't do anything in windows while you moved it, you could keep going.

If you put them back in, the message would be there again. The same thing happens with usb flash drives.

Don't think you can rid yourself of it completely, but right click your taskbar, and find the customize button next to "hide inactive icons". Just find the offending icon and select always hide. It'll be there, but only when you view all the icons in the taskbar.

Aw, that sucks. The RAID is the system drive so better not let any kiddies get close to that or they could force a rapid shutdown. I don't have any flash drives so maybe I'll try to track down the service that handles removable hardware and disable it. It can't hurt to try--I hope.

I get that from both my Epson printer and an old visioneer neg scanner I use occassionally.It goes away when I unplug or turn off.

I can't really unplug my system hard drives though.

I just installed 160g baracudda NCQ 150g drive and got the same thing..I have landparty nf3 250gb motherboard.What caused it to happen was the Nvidia SW IDE driver..I have nividia chipset and it says this drives is used to possibly increase performance but it's not really needed.I uninstalled the sw ide driver and the icon went away...Everything works fine by the way.I'm NOT running raid ...

Joe's onto something.

The SW-IDE driver does indeed cause the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon to come up in response to detection of any SATA drives. It might come up on other driver installations as well, but I can't verify that... I've only seen it happen on 3 nForce installs.

You can permanently _hide_ the Safely Remove Hardware icon, but it's always there, nagging at you, even though you can't see it. One word of relief, though, is that Windows won't allow you to "safely remove" the drive(s). It usually says "Drive in Use", or something like that... and there's no interruption of activity.

1. Right click in the system tray
2. Select Customize Notifications
3. Click Safely Remove Hardware
4. In its drop down box select Always Hide
5. Click OK

One thing I found that the "Always Hide" trick doesn't work on is unused LAN connections. Everytime the computer is rebooted, the connection is unhidden.

Try this it will disdable it
http://safelyremove.com/safelyremovesetup.zip

I have the same problem. It's not only annoying forme, but it prevents my hard drive MP3 player from working unless I disable my printer and modem at startup and reboot.
I installed that thing ^^, and went onto options and clicked disable the icon in the system tray and it did disappear, but does it just hide it.... and so will my mp3 player now work. I'll answer in a mo.

*edit* tried it, my mp3 player still wont work. When i restart, the "safely remove hardware" icon is still in the system tray.

That EXE looks like risky business to me...

What if you found the icon file if it has one seperately and deleted it? Or is its icon file built into it?

It would still be there but it would be pictureless. Also, Windows might not like that one bit.

"One thing I found that the "Always Hide" trick doesn't work on is unused LAN connections. Everytime the computer is rebooted, the connection is unhidden."

This is why I disable inactive LAN connections. They aren't being use anyway, right?

I've got the same "problem" with my SATA drive. I tried the SafelyRemove program, but that's more of a workaround and is an extra program running in the background - not a very good option. There has got to be some way to do it through Windows, perhaps somewhere in the registry. Any ideas?

Old thread, but I've been using this for a while now (works on Vista and XP):
http://www.iconremover.com/

Just run it on startup with /hideapp /removeicon /closeapp and it will do the trick. Terminates itself when it's done so you don't have a program running constantly in the background.

Sweet McFly. I wrote a thread about this years ago, probably before Fords, and
no one came up with an answer. Nice thread revived, and I used it just now and
works with Vista so that's a bonus!

Cheers...

Tam...

To Enable hot-plug filter but hide safe-remove icon ( i386 platform ):

Add and set registry: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\xfilt\Parameter0”

To DWORD value “0x80000000”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To enable hot-plug filter and also shows safe-remove icon ( i386 platform ):

Add and set registry “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\xfilt\Parameter0”

To DWORD value “0x80000001”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To Enable hot-plug filter but hide safe-remove icon ( x64 platform ):

Add and set registry: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\xfiltx64\Parameter0”

To DWORD value “0x80000000”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To enable hot-plug filter and also shows safe-remove icon ( x64 platform ):

Add and set registry “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\xfiltx64\Parameter0”

To DWORD value “0x80000001”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To disable hot-plug filter, set “Parameter0” to zero value.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nour