Sunburn74 wrote:I have a peculiar problem with Win7 and my seagate 1.5TB barracuda hard drive. My current setup is a SSD as my boot drive and the barracuda as a pure storage drive (no program or win7 tie ins). Previously I was able to go to hard drive properties and disable the seagate drive without a reboot needed. The drive would unmount and be disabled.
However, for reasons I can't quite figure out, win7 now requires a reboot to disable the storage drive now.
Can anyone tell me what I can do go back to where the storage drive will not need a reboot inorder to be disabled?
If you ever at any point could boot into Win7 and see your 1.5TB partition/drive *at all* then it was never at any time free of "program or win7 tie ins"...
Follow me? Perhaps that was the case as you wanted it to be in your mind, but if Win7 can see a partition then it's a Win7 partition--or if Win7 can see the drive then it's a Win7 drive, so to speak. If the drive is as of yet unformatted, then Win7 will still put up a drive icon for it--and if you try and access it via the icon you will be asked by Win7 if you'd like to format it.
Is it possible for you to put the Seagate on a separate hard-drive controller, so that in the Device manager you would not disable the partition but you would disable the controller? (you should never, ever have one partition as big as 1.5tb in the first place, but that's beside the point here) That should work.
Disabling a separate controller should do exactly as you asked *except*, as people have already pointed out, unless you have some kind of software running on the drive when you boot into Win7. If that's the case, then you will not be allowed to turn off the drive, separate controller or no, until you have turned off the software running on or pointing to that drive. Do you have some kind of backup software running on your Windows 7 boot partition that is pointing to your Seagate? If so, that would probably be enough to disable your ability to turn off that drive before you turn off your backup software.
One last thing--if you have nothing running on another partition that points at anything on your Seagate partition, or any partition on that Seagate disk, then just format the Seagate partition/drive and see if it returns to its former condition of allowing you to shut the partition down at will from the DM. Good luck.
You might, however, like to mention why you want to do this in the first place...