Quick Tip: Disabling "Safely Remove Hardware" for specific devices
As part of my job, I set up computer lab machines for students at my university. We don't provide them the ability to store data on the computer, of course, so we encourage students to bring in flash drives. Most students prefer to use the 'safely remove hardware' icon to remove their flash drives, which is good. However, I ran into a quandry: our newest machines (slim-factor Optiplexes) have the laptop-style removable DVD drives. Unfortunately, they show up in the remove hardware list as well. I wanted to remove the ability for students to unwillingly remove the DVD drive, but still be able to remove their flash drive.
Luckily a registry hack exists to solve this problem: http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=662383. Basically, you edit a registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\[busname]\....\Capabilities (adjusting as needed for the actual device, you may need to dig for a bit)
and either subtracting 4 if dividing the value by 8 results in 4,5,6, or 7, or ading 80h (1280) otherwise. Backup this registry key in a .reg file and add it to autoexec.bat
This should remove the device from the Safely Remove Hardware list, while still showing other devices.