Add harddisk withour restart

mates007 · 03-22-2004, 07:34 AM

Hello,

is it possible to add a harddisk without restarting a pc? Does linux need to have the hdd to be detected by bios at boot? I have a hdd-tray, and would like to add/remove the disk on the running machine.

Thanks

AutOPSY · 03-22-2004, 07:47 AM

I think zip/jazz drives are hot pluggable,

but you must be smoking some good redhair to hot swap a regular IDE harddisk and think that it is going to work.
REASON: Bios does in fact provide I/O to the ide channels on startup.
If you were able to plug in the drive and ide cable to the disk without the computer tripping powerdown, fdisk or mount would probably just say no such device or equivalent.

michaelk · 03-22-2004, 09:42 AM

You can't unless the IDE controller is designed for hot swapping.

frieza · 03-22-2004, 09:47 AM

well, the short answer is yes and no. for the long answer, I have a laptop that can hot swap i'ts drives, and some computers (mostly server mobos) have hot-swap pci slots as well, but most machines i believe do not natively have the ability to hot swap their drives, and doing so could negatively affect the drive if not the computer, although you could probably buy a hot pluggable ide controller if you really wanted to

mates007 · 03-22-2004, 10:04 AM

Hmm, I have a regular VIA KT600 IDE onboard controller, so I assume it has no hot-plugging cabability. But I will try to read some doc on this topic. Thanks

muah · 03-22-2004, 11:07 AM

I doubt your onboard controller has how swap ability. But another way how to solve the problem is to buy how swap hard drive rack and connect it to your ide controller.