[CentOS] Removable drive configuration

[Stephen Harris]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 09:27:09AM -0500, Robert Heller wrote:
> PATA (IDE) drives are not hot-swapable -- I don't think either the
> kernel IDE driver or many (if any) plain IDE controllers support hot

Annoyingly old kernels used to (2.2? 2.4?  Can't remember).  You could do
"hdparm -b 0 /dev/hdg" (for example) to remove the bus from the kernel
then you could swap the disk, then "hdparm -b 1 /dev/hdg" to reinsert
it; this caused the kernel to rescan the bus and find the new disk and
partitions.  I used to do this all the time using a cheap hotswap bay.
(Caveat: disk needed to be inserted at boot time to cause /dev/hd? to
exist).

The PATA drivers got rewritten at some point which caused this
functionality to get lost.  Now I'm doing this with a USB enclosure
instead, so I've not checked recently to see if it ever got re-added.

-- 

rgds
Stephen