[GLLUG] Hot Swap an ATA Hard Drive -Another Approach

[Matt Graham]

On Wednesday 19 February 2003 18:11, after a long battle with 
technology, Jeff Lawton wrote:
> I have been having difficulty getting the linux scripts Matt
> mentioned to work. The freebsd ones detach and attach great when I
> try it in linux it does not seem to rescan the IDE channel like it
> does in freebsd and does not recognize that I changed the drive. 

Hm.  The kernel-level code for managing this stuff is pretty recent, 
late 2.4 series IIRC.  I don't actually have an IDE hotswap cage or I 
would've tested this personally.

Or... looking at the idectl script, it passes extra parameters to hdparm 
that are not documented in the man page.  GRRR.  Correct syntax would 
appear to be:

hdparm -U 1 /dev/hdc
hdparm -R 1 0 0 /dev/hdc

...and I get some kind of weird error,  HDIO_SCAN_HWIF failed: 
Input/output error.  Great.  Chalk one up for *BSD?

> also the "dangerous" in the in the man pages are a little dis 
> concerning.

This is a CYA on the hdparm developer's part.  Notice how the same 
warnings are present for the -d and -X options, which seem to work OK, 
and remember that the VESA framebuffer drivers in the main kernel are 
still marked as "experimental".

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