Hot swapping a HDD from a second drive bay on T61

DrinkinHomeBrew · 02-11-2015, 03:02 PM

I have a Lenovo T61 and running Linux Mint 16 (17.1 doesn't like my graphics card). I have a removable drive bay caddy in replacement of the CD/DVD drive, so that I can have a second HDD.

I am wondering if there is a way I can remove and put in a different HDD without rebooting the system? I've found I can't just remove the caddy and have the new HDD show up as /dev/sdb where the old one was.

Is this possible, and could someone able to point me in the direction of where to go to find a tutorial on this?

Thanks in advance!

jefro · 02-11-2015, 08:43 PM

Both the OS, bios and system have to fully support hot swap.

The Lenovo manual would help but I've never seen a laptop with hot swap drives.

Generally I've only seen hot swap on servers for drives.

I'd assume you could damage something by inserting it. Might get lucky on removal.

Better turn it off fully, remove ac and battery before changing drives.

veerain · 02-11-2015, 10:20 PM

These days most drives use a SATA connection which is hot swappable from start of it's avilability. But I have not done it myself.

It is better to turn off the laptop and swap as previous post says.

brianL · 02-12-2015, 06:08 AM

Have a look here:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to...trabay_devices

jefro · 02-12-2015, 08:06 PM

Reading up on it more may make me think it could work more easily. In ahci mode it may support it. On servers you turn a key to power off the bus and report to system in a lot of cases. If this laptop has a switched removal then I'd assume it to work.

Unless the owners manual stated you can do this then I'd still kind of wonder.

Ztcoracat · 02-12-2015, 10:49 PM

Try downloading and looking in the PDF for the motherboard and see if there is any mention of the task you'd like to accomplish and how to go about it. (if listed)
http://www.manualsecret.com/docs/1vu...rboard-pdf.pdf

Here's a more in depth look at the specifications. May come in handy later.
http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/pd008989

I completely agree with veerain; turning off the laptop is wise.-

EDDY1 · 02-14-2015, 12:16 PM

I second the statement by Jefro if the bios supports ahci mode. The only thing is that if you didn't enable in bios then you would have to reboot to change it.
Also linux can handle the swith to ahci, but windows can't without editing the registry.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...b-219fcaab2ac9