Hot swap of bay devices -- problem solved (I8K)

Sean Welch welchsm at earthlink.net
Tue Aug 12 14:38:17 PDT 2003


Well, I just tried again and I think I found my issue.

I must have misremembered the steps I tried.  I believe
I inserted the drive, tried an attach (which gave me an
error messag as the channel was already attached), then
tried a reinit.  This confused the kernel mightily
(apparently) because the devices had changed.

Here is what I have discovered I can do successfully 
under 4.8-RELEASE (I have 5.1-RELEASE also installed
and will try that one later):

1) *ALWAYS* do an atacontrol detach [CHANNEL] first,
   even if booted with a battery or floppy drive
   in the bay.  The channel is definitely attached
   at boot whether there are any devices there or
   not.
2) Insert the drive.  If it is a floppy drive it will
   just work.  Running atacontrol attach [CHANNEL]
   won't show anything attached.  If it is an atapi 
   drive run atacontrol attach [CHANNEL] and it will
   show up, ready to be used (provided the device 
   nodes have already been created, of course).

In this case it means that after boot (with a battery
in the bay the way I usually have it) I can do this:

1) atacontrol detach 1
2) Remove battery
3) Insert floppy and use
         *OR*
   Insert Sony CDRW,
   atacontrol attach 1,
   and use

In my case there are no beeps and I do not have to 
suspend.  (Good thing about that latter -- I upgraded
the graphics card and now the bios doesn't resume
from RAM suspends and though suspend to disk works
well it takes 3 minutes to shut down/start up.)

I hope this helps someone else!

I think it might be a good thing to consider adding
some sort of status switch to atacontrol to show 
whether or not a channel is attached...

                                             Sean



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