Dan Jacobson wrote:
IDE is not hot pluggable. Assume it's only safe to replug when the power is off at the wall.The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage as well.
I'm wondering just when it's OK to pull in and out those mobile disk racks. (Where you can slide in and out one of your PC's IDE hard disks with "the ease of a floppy"). It seems one should slide one in only if one plans to reboot. And slide one out only if it has already been unmounted. Are there any other concerns here on Debian GNU/Linux?
(Wonder if the fan on the rack will hopefully go off when the disk is out, as it is 99% of the time.)
Some (eg Vipower) are supposedly hot-pluggable. I spent quite some effort, did lots of trickery involving building special kernels with the IDE driver(s) as modules, loading one to not recognise the other interface and then loading/unplugginh the second when I wanted to replug. I asked questions on lkml.
Nothing worked.
If there is anything left worth trying, it's the 2.6 kernel.
Better, get a USB2 case. They _are_ hot-pluggable, can't conflict with existing drives etc etc.
If you're going to be plugging/unplugging ATA drives, be sure to use a dedicated IDE controller for the purpose so you can't have master/slave conflicts, and if you can't do that,
avoid WD drives. WD drives require different settings depending on whether they are
master, no slave
master, slave present
slave.
Getting that wrong on some systems (and I have such) causes system lockups and failure to boot IN THE BIOS.
I've no objection to firewire, I just don't know whether it works as reliably. I've had 100% success, but the same of one system's a little small.
--
Cheers John
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