Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2001 13:40:26 -0800 From: richard childers <fscked@pacbell.net> To: Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hot swap IDE device? Message-ID: <3AA01349.AE0F5D2B@pacbell.net> References: <20010301112155.A5003@northernbrewer.com>
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I believe this would be possible provided that all filesystem(s) associated with that disk had been explicitly unmounted. Caveat: if you have an active swap partition you would need to reboot with said partition commented out in /etc/fstab before you could remove the drive. Lesson: do not put swap partitions on removeable drives. (-: Note that a similar issue exists with respect to CDROM-based filesystems. (Quick check) Yes, what I used to do with CDROMs was create an entry in /etc/fstab describing the device and its desired mount point; I see that this is now standard and does not need to be done explicitly. The target device is marked with the keyword "noauto" so that the OS knows not to mount it automatically at boot time (read fstab(5) for the details of the behavior). In this way your installation will be robust and will not halt in single user when it encounters the missing device. I'm not sure what would happen when the kernel encountered a different drive geometry, though, or if it would be able to become aware of it without a reboot, should you want to use this single bay for multiple devices (as your question suggests). -- richard Christopher Farley wrote: > Is there any way to get FreeBSD to add/remove an IDE device from a > running system? > > I'm experimenting with a $15 removable IDE hard drive kit. I would > ideally like to be able to power down the drive, remove it, insert > a new drive (possibly a different manufacturer/capacity), power it > up, and force FreeBSD to recognize the new IDE device. > > Is this possible? > > I assume I can swap identical drive models endlessly, and FreeBSD would > be none the wiser. However, two years down the road, it will be impossible > to replace a broken drive with the identical model. > > -- > Christopher Farley > www.northernbrewer.com > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Richard A. Childers Senor UNIX Administrator fscked@pacbell.net (email) 203.556.8471 (voice/msgs) # Providing administrative expertise (not 'damage control') since 1986. # PGP fingerprint: 7EFF 164A E878 7B04 8E9F 32B6 72C2 D8A2 582C 4AFA To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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