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