SATA drives are being identified by Windows as 'removable drives' because
technically they ARE removable drives. Part of the SATA specification is
that such drives are 'hot-swappable'and some motherboard chipset drivers
force windows to show them as such. You wouldn't be able to use that feature
of course because it is your boot drive. Some of the newer motherboards have
corrected this and SATA boot drives do not show as removeable HDD's.


Go to Start/Run type regedit

locate this folder

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\nvata (nvata64 for those using 64bit
windows)

after navigating to this folder, create a DWORD named "DisableRemovable" and
set the value to 1

restart your pc and you should notice the removable icon is no longer there,
which means windows no longer detects your SATA hard drive as a removable
device but other removeable drives will still be shown.