Hello, I am fairly new to linux.
I setup a debian box to be my server for sql, svn and a few other things, and I also setup a cron job to backup all this stuff into a tar archive daily. I have a removable ide tray & hdd and I would like to use it to store the backup archives to keep an off-site copy. Now, my problem is if I wanna use this hdd, I need to plug it in and reboot, because I found no way to make linux recognize it (even manually would be fine enough, I could just check in the backup script, if the device is present, then make the off site copy, otherwise just continue).
So, does anyone know if there is a way to do this without rebooting?

Thanks.

I assume that this drive is plugging directly into the IDE chain on the system. More than likely the IDE chipset on your motherboard is not hot-plug compatible, which is why you are having problems.

A better solution for you would probably be to get one of the IDE to USB conversion kits that are out there, as USB supports hot-pluggin a lot better than standard IDE chipsets.

The conversion kits for external drive carriers are pretty inexpensive, as well.

Yes, I believe the controller is not hot plug compatible, yet I know for a fact if I run windows on this machine I can plug a hard drive, refresh the drives with a click, and it works without giving any trouble to the system's stability. I was hoping this would be possible on linux as well, but I guess not. Thanks for your reply.

Hrm... if that is the case, then it MAY be possible, but I think you would have to be loading the IDE drivers as a module and then, in order to get them to work with the just inserted drive, you would have to unload and reload them in order to get a fresh scan of the drives on the controller.

This is obviously impractical for a machine where you already have some IDE drives on the same controller.

The other possibility is that there is some sort of command you can send to the IDE driver to rescan for new drives, but I have no idea where this would be.

That'd be exactly what I am looking for, if anyone has any idea, please let me know ^ ^