Making external drive non-removable

Does anyone know if there is a way of mounting an external drive under
OS X so that it is considered non-removable by OS X?  (One way to
accomplish this is to boot off of the external drive, which is what
I'm doing right now, but it seems as if there should be a better way.)

I.e., if for some reason an internal disk drive (or the boot disk)
hiccups, the OS patiently waits for it to get better.  (This is
traditionally the way that Unix has behaved about disks.) An application
never receives an error of any kind, nor does it see an empty
filesystem.  It just sees a time delay, while the disk drive is
pondering the meaning of life.  The application is forced by the OS to
wait patiently until the drive is behaving itself again.

With external drives (or at least external USB drives), a drive will
often pause for a little bit, and in the meantime, the OS returns
errors (or perhaps presents an empty filesystem) to the application.
This makes some applications (like iTunes, for instance) completely
spaz, and the only fix is to logout and log back in.  Sometimes, the
database even gets corrupted.

I don't want the programs the I use to spaz.  I want them to just
recovery gracefully, as in the days of yore.

Thanks for any suggestions,
|>oug