Windows 7 sees internal hard drive as an external hard drive?

Running Windows 7 (x64) with four drives. After installing the Windows 7, all the drives were correctly seen as internal drives.

But I changed the drive letters of three of them to avoid rescanning/changing configs for 3TB+ of data.

And now two drives are seen as being external drives (with the external eject icon in the system tray), but they're not external.

I've already tried the registry tricks:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel0\” /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001

And that doesn't work (I added 0-7 channels, the mobo has 8 ports). I've also taken a look at this previous post: How can I remove the option to eject SATA drives from the Windows 7 tray icon?

But there are no answers to my problem.

I have tried reverting the drive letters back to no avail. My BIOS does not have hot swap capabilities enabled and I have removed, replugged the drives, etc.

I do not know what the solution is as it feels as though I've tried everything… which is why I'm here.

The strange thing is that is only occurred on two of the three drives I changed the letters for, and these two drives are not in the same SATA port. When I check the drive properties, the buses read:

Bus Number 0, Target Id 0, LUN 0 & Bus Number 0, Target Id 8, LUN 0

Any help would be greatly appreciated since one of the drives is only 5400 rpm, it runs/benchmarks slower when seen as external than internal which just won't do.