Removing a hard drive on a live system?

mud

Member
Oct 24, 2000
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I just purchased a removable hard disk drawer. Can I safely add or remove a hard drive to my Windows 2000 system without shutting it down? how bout on a Redhat 7.2 linux system?

Startech SNT127A (I got it from buy.com for $19)


Thanks!
 

jacklutz

Senior member
Aug 13, 2001
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I think what you have is more for easy access. I don't know of any normal desktop motherboards that support hot-swapping drives.
 

JC

Diamond Member
Feb 1, 2000
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Yes, you need a drive controller that supports hot-swapping. Not recommended without it :Q
 

RazeOrc

Senior member
Nov 16, 2001
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JCIV is right on, that is unless you want to risk it :)

I have in my experience removed hard drives from active machines, hit the F5 key and it's taken without my machine shutting down, locking up, rebooting, error messages, ect ect WITHOUT a hot swappable controller. But then again, I didn't care about what I was doing and to what :)...
 

mud

Member
Oct 24, 2000
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LOL. So at what point do you hit the F5 key? :) I'm running Win2k. I'm not sure if this applied only Win98 machines.

Anyway, how much is a cheap controller that support IDE hot swapping? how bout scsi? Thanks!

 

dszd0g

Golden Member
Jun 14, 2000
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I have removed lots of drives from a JBOD box connected to an Adaptec 2940, although I just checked there web page and they do say that you can "connect removable drives." I have also done it with a ton of HP SCSI controllers and a couple of Mylex RAID controllers. I do not know if I've ever done it on a controller that does not support removable drives. I do not know if there are any SCSI controllers that do not support removable drives. I guess I'll know when I come across one :) ... or someone lists one here.


<< I don't know of any normal desktop motherboards that support hot-swapping drives. >>


Probably most of the ones that have SCSI built-on.

On Linux I can definitely say that you will want to unmount the filesystem before you remove the drive. Other than that I have done it many times. My (not solely, but I own part of it) Linux box has a 12 drive RAID array. From what I've heard Linux does not rescan the IDE bus if you remove a drive.

Under Microsoft OS's, you have to tell the OS that the drive is removable.

I found this message. "the info that I was reading on kernel traffic was that IDE wasn't designed for this and you could get hardware damage if you tried to hotswap IDE, and thus there was no support *ever* planned for this. :-( " However, there is more recent information Re: Ide Hot-swaping?.
Basically, right now it seems like you have to compile IDE as a module and unload and reload the module.

Agatech has a Linux driver that support hot-swapping IDE for their product.

In most cases hot-swapping IDE is a bad idea. There are hardware solutions out there that will pull it off.

Some Tyan motherboards do support hot swapping IDE drives. Sounds like something Tyan would pull off to me.
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/chassis_solution.html

The Promise SuperTrack supports hot swapping IDE. I am sure most IDE RAID solutions support it, but I have not checked.

There are many other products out there that will do it.

Hopefully this information helps.
 

flood

Diamond Member
Oct 17, 1999
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actually, if you put your computer in sleep/suspend mode - just as long as it doesnt access the drive, you can take it out and being it back later
I used to do it with my mp3 drive between my car mp3 player and main computer.
It was fine unless i changed the data on it.
 

dszd0g

Golden Member
Jun 14, 2000
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flood5, that sounds like a large risk to me. Personally, I wouldn't do it. Is it really worth trashing possibly your hard drive and motherboard? If the motherboard goes it can take out the CPU. I would get some sort of external storage solution to move the data back and forth. Even cuter might be a wireless 802.11b network. When your car is parked in the garage you can browse the files and transfer them while sitting at your computer. You would have to deal with the security issues with 802.11b if you care about that. I really don't know what kind of car mp3 player you have though.
 

mud

Member
Oct 24, 2000
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Hmmm. Maybe a better alternative is to install firewire. Is it possible to take a spare old IDE drive and buy some kind of firewire adapter for it? How much would this cost?

In the meantime, I got this informative response from the Tech Support of the removable HD drawer.

=======================================
Hot Swapping IDE Disk Drawers on Windows 2000

IDE Disk Drawers can be hot swapped under Windows 2000 to provide the ability for non-system drives to:

- Exchange drives between machines.
- Perform backup and restore operations.
- Maintain offline file storage.

The disk drawers may also be used to cold swap the system drive.

In general, the procedure involves dynamically linking and unlinking devices to disks. Volumes on a disk will retain their attributes such as volume-id and drive-id across mounts. All operations can be performed from Computer Management, which can be found in Administrative Tools under Control Panel.

To Dismount a Drive:

1. Stop running any processes, such as SQLServer.
2. Open Computer Management and click on Device Manager.
3. Expand Disk Drives and Disable the removable drive (select the correct drive).
4. Click on Disk Management.
5. Check that the drive has a status of Failed.
6. Wait for the drive to settle.
7. Turn the drawer key to unlock and slide the drive out of the bay.

To Mount a Drive:

1. Slide the drive in the bay and lock with the drawer key.
2. Open Computer Management and click on Device Manager.
3. Enable the removable drive via the Properties menu (may crash 1st time tried).
4. Click on Disk Management.
5. Right click to Reactivate Disk.
6. If needed, right click on volume to Reactivate Volume.
7. If needed, right click on volume to change Drive Letter.
8. To check, click on Rescan under the Action menu.
9. Restart stopped processes such as SQLServer.


Notes:
* Windows 2000 differentiates each physical disk by writing a signature on the disk.
* Define each removable disk as Dynamic and not Basic.
* Assign a different Volume-id to each physical disk. Start a scheme.
* Label the outside of each disk drawer with the Volume-id as well.
* For a group of swappable drives, be sure that all physical disks are of the same manufacture, model, size, etc, otherwise the BIOS would need to be changed when swapping.
* Install the removable disks and drive bays as slave-devices off a permanent master-device such as a CD-ROM or the system drive.
* When mounting a drive, there have been cases of the system crashing. This looks like a bug in Windows 2000.




Ian Davis
Tech Support

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