Hardware

How to Fix Windows 11 SATA BIOS Bug

How to Fix Windows 11 SATA BIOS Bug

Recently, Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 is being affected by a longtime bug occurring in internal SATA drives, where drives are being misread as removable media by the Windows taskbar. This bug has been evident in both SATA HDDs and SSDs. 

According to Microsoft, this bug has affected Microsoft users of anything newer than Windows Vista and onward, which includes Windows 7, 8, 8.1 10 and 11. 

With each Microsoft operating system, this bug has resulted in read and write speed drops, such as this example below:

 

 From a recently posted support document, Microsoft describes this bug as the following:

Symptoms

Internal SATA devices (HDDs or SSDs) may show as removable media in your task bar.

Cause

Whether or not a device is considered removable is determined by your system’s BIOS and how it marks the various SATA ports on the motherboard. The inbox driver directly inspects SATA ports and considers devices connected to those ports marked “external” as removable devices. Not all storage drivers do this, which can be a potential cause for corruption or data loss.

Microsoft has also offered a verified solution to fix this bug for all affected Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11 users. This can be done through Command Prompt CLI with the following steps:

1. Open command prompt with administrator privileges.

2. In the command prompt window, type the following command in hit Enter and "devmgmt.msc".

3. Under "Disk Drives", identify your SATA device you would like the inbox driver to identify as internal. To do so, open "Properties" for this device by right-clicking and selecting "Properties".

4. Check the Bus Number from the Properties overview (“1” in this example).Bus number for SATA disk drive in device manager

5. For Windows 8 and later, type the following command in the previously opened command prompt:

reg.exe add “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\Parameters\Device” /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_MULTI_SZ /d x

Note that "x" will correspond to the Bus Number you noted in Step 4. After doing so, hit Enter. Once doing so, your SATA drive will now be recognized as internal. 

For any further issues, please visit Microsoft's support article on this bug

Reading next

Patriot Viper Blog Scavenger Hunt
Patriot Viper's Guide to Storage Memory

Leave a comment

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.