# DVD drive on laptop showing as removable drive.



## drosera01 (Nov 7, 2006)

I had not noticed it before and i guess its just a new issue.

My laptop HP DV4-1435dx started showing that I have a removable device plugged in. (The "Safely remove device" symbol is showing up in the quick launch area). The optical drive (HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GT20L ATA Device- Drive E is showing up in the toolbar as a removable device.
I know i used to get this "safely remove device" symbol only when i plug flash drive or external HDD on USB port and that is obvious.

I googled this issue and found an microsoft article for windows 7 that implies this happens when some registry value changes and set SATA port as external and can be changed to internal, using this path if the port is channel1.



> reg.exe add
> "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel1" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001


But article clearly says it applies only on windows 7, I still tried to locate that path on Vista and could not locate it.
Help would be appreciated.


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## spunk.funk (May 13, 2010)

Go to Start/search and type *diskmgmt.msc* Right click the *diskmgmt *icon in the search results and *Run As Administrator*. In Disk Management Confirm that the DVD drive is still the *E: *drive. If so, right click the* E: *drive and change *Drive Letter or Paths* and choose a different drive letter then restart the computer. Does it still show as removable? Do you have any removable (USB drives) taking up the* E: *drive now? If so, you can change the drive letter of that device and return the DVD drive to E:


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## drosera01 (Nov 7, 2006)

spunk.funk said:


> Go to Start/search and type *diskmgmt.msc* Right click the *diskmgmt *icon in the search results and *Run As Administrator*. In Disk Management Confirm that the DVD drive is still the *E: *drive. If so, right click the* E: *drive and change *Drive Letter or Paths* and choose a different drive letter then restart the computer. Does it still show as removable? Do you have any removable (USB drives) taking up the* E: *drive now? If so, you can change the drive letter of that device and return the DVD drive to E:


Following your instruction, i changed the drive letter to G from E:. Yes DVD drive was still E: Now it is G: and still shows as *removable Drive G:* I dont have any other USB drives attached to this machine.
Its HP machine and had C drive as primary partition and D drive as recovery partition.
Long time ago, i did partition on C drive to make it C and F, but DVD drive was always E drive. Any other iddeas??


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## drosera01 (Nov 7, 2006)

Still waiting for any idea to resort this out. I know its not a big deal just for normal operation but i happened to have wrongly disconnecting DVD drive instead of removable USB drive quite often as both appears to be removable.
thanks


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