Did I miss something somewhere?

The VT8237 Southbridge on my A8V Deluxe ver2.0 *seems* to allow IDE hotswap
(under XP SP2)! That is - the PATA drives not the SATA which it *is*
supposed to support. Is this a feature I missed in my reading? Or is this an
undocumented feature that I sure as hell would have like to have known about
earlier?

Pete

Immuno wrote:
> Did I miss something somewhere?
>
> The VT8237 Southbridge on my A8V Deluxe ver2.0 *seems* to allow IDE hotswap
> (under XP SP2)! That is - the PATA drives not the SATA which it *is*
> supposed to support. Is this a feature I missed in my reading? Or is this an
> undocumented feature that I sure as hell would have like to have known about
> earlier?
>
> Pete
>
>

If you mean that the PATA drive shows up in "Safely Remove Hardware",
probably an oddity in the driver - PATA hardware definitely doesn't
support it, at least not safely..

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from (E-Mail Removed)
Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

"Robert Hancock" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:MjgCd.678873$Pl.207184@pd7tw1no...
> Immuno wrote:
>> Did I miss something somewhere?
>>
>> The VT8237 Southbridge on my A8V Deluxe ver2.0 *seems* to allow IDE
>> hotswap (under XP SP2)! That is - the PATA drives not the SATA which it
>> *is* supposed to support. Is this a feature I missed in my reading? Or is
>> this an undocumented feature that I sure as hell would have like to have
>> known about earlier?
>>
>> Pete
>
> If you mean that the PATA drive shows up in "Safely Remove Hardware",
> probably an oddity in the driver - PATA hardware definitely doesn't
> support it, at least not safely..
>
> --
> Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
> To email, remove "nospam" from (E-Mail Removed)
> Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

No, it doesn't show as - say - a USB drive (flash or otherwise) would. So
no, no "Safely Remove Hardware".

I'm in the process of building a new machine (A8V) in an old box, that
happened to have a pull-out caddy. I was in the process of doing something
when I absent mindedly pulled the caddy complete with the "E-drive"
(master-secondary) out of the tray. This would usually cause a freeze, and
require a reboot.

But it didn't!

Looked at "My Computer" ... E-drive still there. Went to My
Computer>properties>hardware>device manager>disk drives>Scan for Changes
.....GONE!

Slid the drive back in, relocked and repowered, re-did the above .... BACK
AGAIN!

Changed with a different drive - changes showed.

I *AM* ensuring that the drive-active light is out before removing any
drives - but so far so good. I've worked my way through about half a dozen
query/crappy drives that have been sitting around for a while. Been running
various Seagate and Western Digital utilities and Partition Magic.

So far no data loss/corruption evident - other than confirming dud drives
were indeed duds!

)

Pete

The interface was not designed with this in mind.
You are more likely seeing a well written OS with well written drivers
handling an error situation extremely well.

IE I have had power fail on drives from bumping cables etc many times and no
OS crash - this is what you would want.

I suggest you don't push your luck.

- Tim



"Immuno" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:crc8dp$e1s$(E-Mail Removed)...
>
> "Robert Hancock" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:MjgCd.678873$Pl.207184@pd7tw1no...
>> Immuno wrote:
>>> Did I miss something somewhere?
>>>
>>> The VT8237 Southbridge on my A8V Deluxe ver2.0 *seems* to allow IDE
>>> hotswap (under XP SP2)! That is - the PATA drives not the SATA which it
>>> *is* supposed to support. Is this a feature I missed in my reading? Or
>>> is this an undocumented feature that I sure as hell would have like to
>>> have known about earlier?
>>>
>>> Pete
>>
>> If you mean that the PATA drive shows up in "Safely Remove Hardware",
>> probably an oddity in the driver - PATA hardware definitely doesn't
>> support it, at least not safely..
>>
>> --
>> Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
>> To email, remove "nospam" from (E-Mail Removed)
>> Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/
>
> No, it doesn't show as - say - a USB drive (flash or otherwise) would. So
> no, no "Safely Remove Hardware".
>
> I'm in the process of building a new machine (A8V) in an old box, that
> happened to have a pull-out caddy. I was in the process of doing something
> when I absent mindedly pulled the caddy complete with the "E-drive"
> (master-secondary) out of the tray. This would usually cause a freeze, and
> require a reboot.
>
> But it didn't!
>
> Looked at "My Computer" ... E-drive still there. Went to My
> Computer>properties>hardware>device manager>disk drives>Scan for Changes
> ....GONE!
>
> Slid the drive back in, relocked and repowered, re-did the above .... BACK
> AGAIN!
>
> Changed with a different drive - changes showed.
>
> I *AM* ensuring that the drive-active light is out before removing any
> drives - but so far so good. I've worked my way through about half a dozen
> query/crappy drives that have been sitting around for a while. Been
> running various Seagate and Western Digital utilities and Partition Magic.
>
> So far no data loss/corruption evident - other than confirming dud drives
> were indeed duds!
>
> )
>
> Pete
>

"Mercury" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message news:crdttn$ji$(E-Mail Removed)...
> The interface was not designed with this in mind.
> You are more likely seeing a well written OS with well written drivers
> handling an error situation extremely well.
>
> IE I have had power fail on drives from bumping cables etc many times and
> no OS crash - this is what you would want.
>
> I suggest you don't push your luck.
>
> - Tim
>

I've still not seen this "documented" anywhere -and am beginning to come to
the same conclusion. Its just that I'm so USED to system hangs when I've
done similar (stupid) things in the past...

Anyhow, I now take the precaution of going into the Device Manager and
uninstalling the drive, ...which it does. Do the change-over, ask it to
"scan for hardware changes", gets picked up... and off we go again. It's
been good for a couple of dozen swaps so far in a single session. I've been
torturing a AV8 with a 3000+ Winchester with HTT set at 280 (2.5GHz) )) -
just thought I'd do something useful with it like go through my pile of
"I'll just check it one more time before I bin it" pile of old HD's while it
was sitting there.

The puzzling thing is that not only does the OS seem to be "happy" but I
don't see any BIOS issues changing 5400/7200's, 66/100/133's, brands or
FAT32/NTFS either.

Anyway - I'm certainly not complaining!

Pete