Internal HD recognised as external drive

[heineken]

This isn't something troubling or anything, but it's just one of the thousand tiny little things wrong with my laptop that makes it terribly obvious it's already more than 2 years old.

My internal harddrive is being recognised as an external, removable one resulting in the fact that the "remove external drives" icon is eternally in my system tray:



As I said it's not a problem, but it's bugging me. This has been this way for at least a month now, if not longer, and several updates to Vista have gone by which haven't done anything. I've checked everything but all drivers are up-to-date, so I can't figure out what this is.

Any ideas what causes/could fix this?

[joliet_jane]

It's a SATA drive, right? There's nothing wrong. This is normal.

SATA drives actually are removable drives, in how they work. It's even possible to get external SATA connectors on a PC case. It's just unpopular to do so.

[RomanClock]

You should be able to hide the icon.

[heineken]

It's a SATA drive, right? There's nothing wrong. This is normal.

SATA drives actually are removable drives, in how they work. It's even possible to get external SATA connectors on a PC case. It's just unpopular to do so.

If it's normal that this happens then it's a little weird it's only been doing this for a few weeks of the 2 years I've had this computer.