I'm trying to figure out how to mount a removable hard drive that's not connected at boot time.

I am using Mandrake 10.1 CE on a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop. I have an extra hard drive that I can swap out with my CD/DVD burner. If I boot with the hard drive in place, the OS sees the drive and I can mount it from /dev/hdc1. However, if I boot with something else inserted into the bay (i.e. the CD/DVD burner drive), and later remove that drive and insert the hard drive, the OS never makes a /dev/hdc1 entry.

How do I get the OS to notice that the new drive is there, so I can mount it?

Thanks,
Jake

Bump

I've never done exactly that but do you unmount the drive before removing it? Then after installing the other drive do you mount it? I think you will have to be rather specific during the mount or make sure that the fstab file is correct for the drive. On my laptop with FC2 the entry for the cdrom is /dev/cdrom so I suppose that I could make another entry for an hdc.

I have a spare drive and was thinking of getting the parts to use it in the removable bay and am interested in your results.

Even in Windows you are required to unmount the drive before swapping it with another. The proper Windows term for the action escapes me at the moment.

No, I didn't unmount the CD Drive first (Actually, I don't have to do anything to "unmount" the drive in Windows before removing it, so it didn't occur to me that it could be causing a problem in Linux).

I did try to mount the hard drive after inserting it, but there was no /dev/hdc entries. I'll try unmounting the CD drive before removing it, and see if that makes the OS recognize the hard drive after adding it (so the /dev/hdc entries will appear).