Hey all. I've spent all day googling, trying things, hunting for options, searching the forums, asking people, everything. There are no topics in the forum (or pages on Google) with a real solution to this problem.

I have an nForce4 motherboard and use the onboard SATA for my HDD. Since it's SATA 2 it's hotpluggable. This causes the "safely remove hardware" icon to appear in my system tray. I do not want to merely hide the icon, I want it gone from my system tray.

There is a program called Safely Remove Icon Remover, but ludicriously it costs $10 and is shareware. Nonetheless I downloaded and installed it, and sure enough it works as advertised. I've run FileMon and RegMon while enabling and disabling the Safely Remove Hardware icon and I can't find anything of interest - there are no values being written by this process, only queries, so it does not appear to be a registry hack. You can try the program yourself here: http://www.safelyremove.com/

If someone else would like to help me try and get to the bottom of this, it'd be appreciated. I have checked all manner of drive properties, the SATA controller properties, all that I can, and I can't find any way to make this a permanent drive seen as non-removable.

Any help finding a solution would be much appreciated.

Edited April 15, 200620 yr by LiquidRain

I have the same chipset as you and that has allways annoyed me as well. I too would be very interested in a solution.

I do not use nf4, but;

-a few days ago I set-up a new computer for my friend an it was nf4 and I saw that problem there.

-This is only a guess:

when running the setup program of the nf4 chipset, I think on the seckond section it asked for a ...I do not remember..a stuff. I clicked yes,

I think that driver makes that problem.

so uninstal the driver and run setup again, when it asked say "no" to this stuff.

It may work.sorry for my bad english.

i have the solution. apparently u didnt to a good enough job of searching the forum

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=52517&st=0

Hey thx. That's great. Do you think you perhaps could post your resourcehacked stobject.dll so that it is the win2k file but with the xp icon? I don't much care for the yellow one.

well i dont have that problem now, that was on my old comp. i am also using the 64bit version of windows xp so...

u can dload resource tuner and edit stobject.dll, its very easy to do

Ok. I just thought that if you had the file handy it would be very easy for you to just upload it. But I guess it's just as easy for me to do it myself.