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Making a IDE HDD removable under WinXP Pro

Confused

Confused

Elite Member
I have a removable hdd tray in my WinXP computer which houses the 40gb IDE drive for my car MP3 player, and i'd like for it to be able to be removed straight out from WinXP without having to do anything else. It's not on any other IDE controller card, just the one on my motherboard.

This is doable in Win98 quite easily, and that will even let me do it with the drive as my boot drive! However i have not been able to find a way to make a HDD removable under XP, which is annoying me as i currently have to either reset the computer to take it out, or go to Device Manager, disable the drive then i can take it out, then when i put it back enable it again!

Is there a way to do this, or am i barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks in advance 🙂

Confused
 
Just did a Google search, seems there are products out there that would suggest it is possible...
 
you can't just turn it off and pull it out? does it lock up the copmputer then or soemthign?

 
If the tray isn't made to be hot-swappable it's not a good idea to use it that way, you will end up frying the drive, the motherboard or both.
 
I don't think there would be a problem turning it off, but to plug it back in he'd have to reboot, so the drive could be recognized. at least I don't know of a way to make ide drives hot swappable, but maybe someone else does.
 
You can buy hotswapable drives that are meant for doing what you want to do. Particularly servers have hotswapable drives so they never shut down. Switching drives like that isn't recomended.
 
Particularly servers have hotswapable drives so they never shut down. Switching drives like that isn't recomended.
Click to expand...

Servers also normally use SCSI drives with enclosures and drive bays made for hotswap, also SCSI has the ability to powerdown just 1 drive while IDE has to power down a whole bus. In the end, IDE just wasn't made to do hotswap.
 
IDE was not designed to be hot-swappable. When your taking your drive in and out if all 40 data wires + 4 power lines do not connect/disconnect simultainiously you could very well fry something.

There are products out there that will allow you to have a hot-swap IDE drive, but you also need to install the software that comes with it to keep the OS from freaking out when you take out the drive.

Win2k/XP will not let you set a IDE drive as removable simply because IDE drives where never designed to do this.

If you want to hot-swap IDE wait for SerialATA cards, drives, and adapters to start shipping. SerialATA fully supports hot-swapping 😀
 
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