hi everyone. i've been searching the web and in here and in newsgroups for weeks.

It seems that linux supports HDD hot-swap, sort of, sometimes.

I'd basically like a hot-swap setup so at any time i can add a random hard drive to my system and see what's on it, what filesystems, what partitions.

In some cases these will be drives with bad sectors, or even bad MBR (boot sectors, first cylinders). That's why i just want a hot swap rig so i can just jam them in there and see what's what.

what i'm assuming i'll need:

a bay for SCSI
a bay for PATA
a bay for SATA

some setup for USB should be simple enough, duh.

but what hardware do i need for the non-USB, non-firewire bus?

what software to connect a new HDD, and add it to /dev/hd* or /dev/sd*, etc?

can i do this without knowing the number of cylinders and heads and sectors? ie, without the bios knowing?

anyone know if i can do this with laptop HDDs in a 3.5" desktop hot swap bay? just with an adapter to make it into a 3.5" drive and put it in the hotswap caddy and jam it in?

note that in this case this has nothing to do with RAID.

thanks!

You will need controllers for each interface that are designed to be hot swappable. I've seen threads where others have sucessfully hot swapped drives with non capable controllers but I would not recommend it.

It should be possible to use a laptop with an adapter for hotswapping IDE drives. There are both IDE to USB and SATA to USB converters. This might be cheaper then purchasing seperate hotswapable controllers.