Need some advice on hot-swap SATA drive under Windows XP

[Steve]

I would like to use hot-swap SATA drive as a backup storage medium. The
principle hard disk subsystems on this machine are a SCSI RAID 1 (on an Adaptec
controller) and an ATA133 RAID 1 on a Highpoint controller. The system has an
on-board SATA controller that is hot-swap capable (according to the MB
manufacturer). I have installed a removable SATA drive bay in an available 5
1/4" bay, and several 160 GB SATA drives in the drive trays for this bay.
Windows XP Professional is running on this machine. The drivers for the SATA
controller installed fine, and when a drives is inserted in the bay, Windows XP
recognizes this drive, and you can read and write it.

The problem I am having is that Windows XP considers the SATA drive to bea
fixed drive, and I cannot figure out how to tell the OS that it is removable.
There doesn't seem to be any good way of telling the OS that I want to remove
this drive so that the OS can flush the buffers, etc.

If I just pull out the disk, I get an error message in the error logs, but when
I put the disk back in and do a chkdsk, the file system is fine.

How can I do a clean Windows XP remove of this hot-swap drive?

Thanks in advance.

Steve

 

[Peter]

fsutil volume dismount <volume letter>:


I would like to use hot-swap SATA drive as a backup storage medium. The
principle hard disk subsystems on this machine are a SCSI RAID 1 (on an
Adaptec
controller) and an ATA133 RAID 1 on a Highpoint controller. The system has
an
on-board SATA controller that is hot-swap capable (according to the MB
manufacturer). I have installed a removable SATA drive bay in an available
5
1/4" bay, and several 160 GB SATA drives in the drive trays for this bay.
Windows XP Professional is running on this machine. The drivers for the
SATA
controller installed fine, and when a drives is inserted in the bay, Windows
XP
recognizes this drive, and you can read and write it.

The problem I am having is that Windows XP considers the SATA drive to be a
fixed drive, and I cannot figure out how to tell the OS that it is
removable.
There doesn't seem to be any good way of telling the OS that I want to
remove
this drive so that the OS can flush the buffers, etc.

If I just pull out the disk, I get an error message in the error logs, but
when
I put the disk back in and do a chkdsk, the file system is fine.

How can I do a clean Windows XP remove of this hot-swap drive?

Thanks in advance.

Steve

 

[J. Clarke]

I would like to use hot-swap SATA drive as a backup storage medium. The
principle hard disk subsystems on this machine are a SCSI RAID 1 (on an
Adaptec
controller) and an ATA133 RAID 1 on a Highpoint controller. The system
has an on-board SATA controller that is hot-swap capable (according to the
MB
manufacturer). I have installed a removable SATA drive bay in an
available 5 1/4" bay, and several 160 GB SATA drives in the drive trays
for this bay.
Windows XP Professional is running on this machine. The drivers for the
SATA controller installed fine, and when a drives is inserted in the bay,
Windows XP recognizes this drive, and you can read and write it.

The problem I am having is that Windows XP considers the SATA drive to be
a fixed drive, and I cannot figure out how to tell the OS that it is
removable. There doesn't seem to be any good way of telling the OS that I
want to remove this drive so that the OS can flush the buffers, etc.

You can't. Search the Microsoft site for "devcon.exe". It lets you enable
and disable the drive--files should be closed before it disables the
driver. Doesn't always work though and I haven't figured out the whys of
that yet.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I would like to use hot-swap SATA drive as a backup storage medium. The
principle hard disk subsystems on this machine are a SCSI RAID 1 (on an Adaptec
controller) and an ATA133 RAID 1 on a Highpoint controller. The system has an
on-board SATA controller that is hot-swap capable (according to the MB
manufacturer). I have installed a removable SATA drive bay in an available 5
1/4" bay, and several 160 GB SATA drives in the drive trays for this bay.
Windows XP Professional is running on this machine. The drivers for the SATA
controller installed fine, and when a drives is inserted in the bay, Windows XP
recognizes this drive, and you can read and write it.

The problem I am having is that Windows XP considers the SATA drive to be a
fixed drive, and I cannot figure out how to tell the OS that it is removable.

Device manager | diskdrives | properties | settings,
or at least that's how it is with Win9x.

 

[Stan Shankman]

Steve,



Greetings guy, I have just read you Usenet posting:



"Need some advise on hot-swap SATA drives under Windows XP"



This is exactly what I want to do!



If you look at comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage, you will see a posting of
mine.

I received a mixed bag of replies. Some saying it can't be done.

But what I have discovered is that nobody seems to be speaking with any real
authority.



What have you learned?



I know you got a reply saying you can't do it, but you and I know otherwise.



So my question is, what have you learned?



Have you heard of 'DriveSwap32"?

It is software that will allow you to "flush" a drive from the system so
that it can safely be replaced with a different drive.



You can find it at www.driveswap.com



I do not own the software, and have not tried it. So I can not say if it is
any good or not.

I'm wondering what you ended up doing.



Let me know will yah?



Thanks,



- Stan Shankman



I would like to use hot-swap SATA drive as a backup storage medium. The
principle hard disk subsystems on this machine are a SCSI RAID 1 (on an
Adaptec
controller) and an ATA133 RAID 1 on a Highpoint controller. The system has
an
on-board SATA controller that is hot-swap capable (according to the MB
manufacturer). I have installed a removable SATA drive bay in an available
5
1/4" bay, and several 160 GB SATA drives in the drive trays for this bay.
Windows XP Professional is running on this machine. The drivers for the
SATA
controller installed fine, and when a drives is inserted in the bay, Windows
XP
recognizes this drive, and you can read and write it.

The problem I am having is that Windows XP considers the SATA drive to be a
fixed drive, and I cannot figure out how to tell the OS that it is
removable.
There doesn't seem to be any good way of telling the OS that I want to
remove
this drive so that the OS can flush the buffers, etc.

If I just pull out the disk, I get an error message in the error logs, but
when
I put the disk back in and do a chkdsk, the file system is fine.

How can I do a clean Windows XP remove of this hot-swap drive?

Thanks in advance.

Steve

 

[J. Clarke]

I would like to use hot-swap SATA drive as a backup storage medium. The
principle hard disk subsystems on this machine are a SCSI RAID 1 (on an
Adaptec
controller) and an ATA133 RAID 1 on a Highpoint controller. The system
has an on-board SATA controller that is hot-swap capable (according to the
MB
manufacturer). I have installed a removable SATA drive bay in an
available 5 1/4" bay, and several 160 GB SATA drives in the drive trays
for this bay.
Windows XP Professional is running on this machine. The drivers for the
SATA controller installed fine, and when a drives is inserted in the bay,
Windows XP recognizes this drive, and you can read and write it.

The problem I am having is that Windows XP considers the SATA drive to be
a fixed drive, and I cannot figure out how to tell the OS that it is
removable. There doesn't seem to be any good way of telling the OS that I
want to remove this drive so that the OS can flush the buffers, etc.

If I just pull out the disk, I get an error message in the error logs, but
when I put the disk back in and do a chkdsk, the file system is fine.

How can I do a clean Windows XP remove of this hot-swap drive?

Thanks in advance.

Personally I use the devcon utility to disable the drive. First you have to
find the device id, and you may need to make up some batch files for the
different drives you have. Once I've inserted the replacement I use devcon
to re-enable it.

No guarantees that this is going to work for you.