Every month we get new Windows updates focused on fixing bugs and issues spread throughout the operating system. And it is that Microsoft wants to be able to offer the best experience to the users of its operating system. Of course, although the company focuses on fix new bugs that are appearing in the OS, there are errors that have been present in the system for more than 10 years (since Windows 7) and that Microsoft is still dragging version after version.
Windows 7 had a very annoying error that has brought many users to the head. And it is that the operating system incorrectly read hard drives of the computer, connected to the SATA ports of the motherboard, thinking that they are removable units that we can disconnect by hand. For this reason, the pendrive icon appears on the Windows taskbar indicating that we have a removable medium connected to the computer when, in reality, it is not.
Although in reality who should choose whether a device is removable (a flash drive, or external hard drive) or not (like conventional hard drives) is determined by the system BIOS. However, this time, the Windows taskbar driver itself is misreading the information, and marks all these drives as external and as we can disconnect them without problems.
If it were only the icon and the corresponding warning, there would be no major problem. However, this can be dangerous for all our data. The problem with this is that not all hard drives support this. And, if we select the option to remove drive, it is easy to lose data from the drive, or even the entire drive to get corrupted.
How to fix it on any Windows
This is a bug that has been with us for more than a decade. Therefore, we believe that Microsoft is not very keen to fix it, at least in the short term. However, the company has left us some clues as to what we have to do to mitigate this error.
The first thing we will do is, if we have the appropriate knowledge, try update the BIOS of the computer. Some of the newer versions have mitigated this bug and make Windows recognize drives just fine. However, this is not available to everyone. Therefore, we leave you an alternative way to mitigate it.
From Windows itself, what we will do is open a CMD window, with administrator permissions, and execute the “devmgmt.msc” command in it. By doing so, we will see a list with all the devices. We must search in it for the unit that appears marked as removable, select it to be able to know all the data on the hard disk, write down the unit ID, and execute the command indicated by Microsoft on its website depending on whether we are using Windows 7 or Windows 8 or later.
After restarting the computer, the unit will already be correctly configured, and we will not run the risk of disconnecting it by mistake.
