Detect a hot swapped device without reboot.
 

Hi all,

I am a complete Linux Newbie, so please forgive me if this is a dumb question.

(This is is a re-post cos I didn't get any answers in the Linux Hardware forum - sorry).

I have a Dell Latitude D600 notebook, with Fedora Core 2 installed. It comes with a CD-RW/DVD+RW drive that can be ejected and replaced with a modular bay containing a second hard disk. I have no problems using either device, as long as I boot with the desired device already in the bay - eg: if I want to burn a CD/DVD, it works fine if I boot with the CD/DVD drive in the bay; similarly, I can mount the second hard disk fine if I boot with it in the bay.

But, I can't work out how to hot swap them, and get Linux to detect the swap without rebooting.

Just now I have booted with the CD/DVD drive in the bay. I now need to access files on the second hard disk, so I have ejected the CD/DVD drive and inserted the 2nd HDD.

When I execute fdisk -l, I get the following:


It doesn't detect the other drive. If I boot with the second hard disk already in the bay, I get the following from executing fdisk -l:


As you can see it has nicely detected the second disk (/dev/hdc).

After all that preamble, here come the questions:

1. How do I make Linux detect that the device has been swapped? This applies to either device being removed/inserted.

2. Also, is there some command I should execute before ejecting one of the devices?

Thanks,

Paul Hobbs

I can't tell you exactly what you need to do, but here is a link to someone who as a dell laptop and they appear to have found a way to make this work. Hope it helps!

http://ltswww.epfl.ch/~dsanta/resour...ll-i8500-linux

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