Hot Swapping SATA Drives

[login123]

Have done a bit of searching, most information threads about this seem to stop at 1 or 2 years old.

This ability seems to depend on the chipset, not sure of that.

There is a free utility called HotSwap for win xp and win 7 that says it enables hotswapping. Link is here:

http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

Have not tried it, might but not unless necessary.

 

This may be so common a thing that nobody even talks about it anymore, but I don't know the answer.

 

So, has anybody here done it, that is plug or unplug a SATA HDD with the OS running?

Not running on the removed drive, of course.

[Winapp2.ini]

I worked on a ToughBook today that let you hotswap drive (system) and battery. Pretty neat.

[login123]

Thanks, winapp.

What i want to do is plug in an hdd with a working OS on it after my win xp is running and virtualized.

Not to run the OS, but to modify partitions.

Did that once by booting the computer with the drive already plugged in, and the result was a lot of leftover registry entries from windows recognizing the drive as new hardware.

That make any sense? Its early here.

[Alan_B]

Free downloads for either Boot CD or Boot Flash

http://www.partition...ootable-cd.html

http://www.partition...lash-drive.html

With those you can plug your SATA HDD into the PC and boot into a partition manager without Windows being aware of the "foreign" HDD.

 

Hot plugging drives onto an active Data + Address + Power Bus would be way outside of my comfort level.

 

For me the only possible (and potentially valuable) use of this software is that it promises to safely remove eSATA external drives as easily as Windows Drive Manager can deal with USB.

I am using Zentimo xStorage Manager and that is an easier way to remove USB2 drives,

but it cannot remove eSATA - If I use eSATA for an external backup I can disable it but cannot remove it until I have shut down.

[login123]

Hot plugging drives onto an active Data + Address + Power Bus would be way outside of my comfort level.

 

Yep, same here. Thanks, Alan. I will use those. I knew about them, just didn't think of them.

Wish I had, as I must now dig through the registry and get rid of those unnecessary entries.

 

What I mentioned in post 3 was this week. I started this xp computer with a laptop hard drive plugged in (in addition to the IDE hd with win xp on it). The laptop drive had failed and I wanted to see what was left on it. All the files, folders and boot stuff was still there, but it flashed an imminent failure warning and then windows xp recognized it, and left those reg entries.

 

Now ... what I really wanted to do was start this computer, get Powershadow running, THEN plug the other hdd in. Just didn't quite have the nerve.