On Wed, Jun 24, 1998 at 11:29:38PM -0700, Damon Muller wrote: > Hey Folks, > > I have a 1.2G IDE HD that I have in a removable drive cady on my Bo > system. It's not a 'hot-swap' drive or anything sophisticated like that, > and on my Windoze system I wouldn't have even considered pulling it out > while the PC was running. > > However, under Linux, shouldn't I just be able to unmount or mount the > drive at will? Would that damage or confuse anything? Or possibly put > in the drive once I have booted without it? > > Anyone have a similar setup? Hotswapping devices not intended for it is a Bad Thing(tm). However, if you are determined... I have safely hot-swapped network/sound/serial boards under Linux with no problems, BUT that does not mean it is safe. Chances are you will fry something. I do _NOT_ recommend that you even attempt a hot-swap of an IDE device. If you are going to hotswap, you _must_ turn off the driver for it first, ie rmmod it. Since you are booting off an IDE device, it is compiled in the kernel, and you can't rmmod it- so when you disconnect the drive, the kernel will complain _loudly_. I tried it once, just to see- ended up hard resetting my box.
If you wanted a hot-swappable setup, you might try setting up some sort of ramdisk root fs with the ide driver compiled as a module and all your important stuff (/usr, /var etc) mounted off your ide drive, you could then drop to single user mode, umount the ide devices, rmmod the driver and maybe have a chance. -- ______________________________________________________________ | ian eure, network admin, freelance security consultant, and | | manically depressed paranoid schizophrenic, at your service. | ; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://minion.org ; : raw speed = 105.6 wpm with 4.5% errors : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
