(Semi)hot swap IDE

[Toomas Aas]

Hi!

> Just for the record I have the kind of setup you're talking
> about - I successfully 'hot swapped' a 40Gb IDE disk using a hdd
> caddy tray but there are caveats (mostly highlighted above) - using the
> term 'hot swap' loosely here because it just doesn't feel too clever
> doing it :P
> 
> I found the following:
> 
> - I could remove/reinsert the device only if it was originally in the machine on
>   boot - this is fairly obvious I suppose.  Otherwise the device just
>   doesn't show up.

Just to make it clear for myself - did you try running 'atacontrol 
attach <channel>' after attaching the drive that wasn't attached at 
boot time and it still didn't show up?

> - I could re-insert the device successfully but only if I'd umounted it
>   first before removing it.

That's obvious. Since I'm planning to use this disk as a backup media, 
I'll keep the FS unmounted most of the time anyway - to be protected 
from 'rm -rf /' type of things.

Thanks for your input.
--
Toomas Aas | toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee | http://www.raad.tartu.ee/~toomas/
* Character density:  The number of very weird people in the office.