Force Removable Disk to detect as Local Disk

[SunShock]

How does Windows detect whether a disk is Local or Removable? I can't see any real rhyme or reason. For example, I have two USB external hard drives and two USB flash drives. One hard drive and one of the flash drives detect as "Local Disk" and one hard drive and one of the flash drive detects as "Removable Disk" in My Computer.

The application in this case is that PerfectDisk will only defragment drives that are considered Local, so I would like to convert the hard drive that comes up as "Removable Disk" to "Local Disk" so I can defragment it with PerfectDisk rather than the horribly unresponsive built-in defragmenter.

 

[bcastner]

That determination comes from the chipset level drivers. It should be determined by standard. For example, a SATA drive should enumerate as Removable, as the SATA standard is for the controller to support Hot Swapping.

The second case, and this might apply with your USB devices (which should be removable) would be for the manufacturer to fiddle with the media descriptor byte. This is in the Partition table for the device. An F8 at offset 0x20 would do the job I think.

Or, the device manufacturer could load a shim through the AutoStart feature to make the drive appear fixed.

In any case, the Standards for USB and SATA are for XP to recognize the devices as removable.

For PefectDisk, have you (according to Raxco):

. The System Account must have READ permission on the drive in order to be visible to PerfectDisk. This preserves the Windows 2003/2000/XP security model. Check the System Account permissions from Disk Administrator -> Partition Properties -> Security -> Permissions. Add SYSTEM if it is not there.

. Do a Start, Run, regsvr32 ole32.dll

Give there tech-support an email about the problem:

http://www.raxco.com/support/nt_email.cfm

.

 

[linney]

This first article talks about a bit being set on the drives to determine its type.

Removable Disk -> Local Disk

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...le+Disk+or+Local+Disk&rnum=4#9394bbed264f90c3

http://groups.google.com/groups/search?ie=UTF-8&q=Removable+Disk+or+Local+Disk&qt_s=Search