Re: IDE driver able to hot-swap?

Mike A. Harris (mharris@ican.net)
Sun, 2 Aug 1998 03:09:51 -0400 (EDT)

On Sat, 1 Aug 1998 brianc@palaver.net wrote:

> I have posted this question all over the place, and am only posting it here
> b/c several people have told me they thought it belongs here.
>
> I have an ATA Compact Flash Card in my digital camera, and can see it as a
> hard drive on my system via an IDE-enabled Adtron "Solidstate Data Drive."
>
> The gist of my question is "why can't I hot-swap cards in and out of this
> drive using the Linux IDE driver." I am told that hotswapping can be done
> under M$ Win/NT.
>
> As long as I power down the computer, boot it up with the card in the drive,
> and leave it in there, it works just fine, looking like a 20MB DOS-formatted
> disk.
>
> If I unmount it though, or remove the card from the drive and then re-insert
> it, I haven't figured out any way to subsequently use the card.
>
> If the IDE driver *should* be able to do this, I'd sure appreciate knowing
> how.
>
> If you've read this far, ob the kernel too: I have emailed people I saw
> posting here recently on the long-running Drinking Penguin thread, asking
> where to get instructions for bringing up the logo at bootime. None of the
> respndents could tell me how.

About 2 months ago I accidentally unplugged the power cable from
my internal IDE Quantum Fireball. I plugged it right back in
too. Linux didn't burp at all. I did a sync, and it seemed to
work ok. I powered down, back up, and everything was fine. FSCK
didn't even complain! My WHOLE LINUX system resides on this
drive, as well as DOS and W95. All filesystems were mounted, and
had cached data yet to be written to disk.

The drive survived, no trouble, no data loss. I was lucky....

But when I posted the miracle, many people responded that they
PURPOSEFULLY hot swap IDE drives all the time with no trouble. I
guess it is an experiment you'll have to do yourself.

Good luck!

--
Mike A. Harris  -  Computer Consultant  -  Linux advocate


Escape from the confines of Microsoft's operating systems and push your
PC to it's limits with LINUX - a real OS. http://www.redhat.com






-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html