can we hot swap IDE and SATA while the system is turned "ON"?

lets say for example, i have drives that the BIOS couldnt recognize, and would only freeze the system during bootup if installed before the system is turned on.

I want to boot up the computer into DOS and victoria, from here, can I plug either IDE or SATA drives? take note, that the system is TURNED ON while plugging either IDE or SATA harddisk.

SATA maybe yes - if the program does low level access it doesn't care for BIOS detection BUT some operations act different if the drive was recognised or not, IDE on some machines and in certain conditions may make system hang or reset when connected with machine on. And YES, it is not completely safe to do it (for the controller).

how true is that?......

If you don't believe it, you can take your chances and see for yourself.

Vantec and other companies make trays that are hot-swappable for IDE and SATA drives.

Alternately, stick your drive in a USB enclosure and you can connect / disconnect it at will.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

You need some mechanism in the host adapter to offline the disk, and to reinitialize the port when the disk comes back online.

I am used to real equipment, but I have done some experiments with some cheap raid (ICH and Promise.) I found that the best chance of success is when the array is defined in the host adapter. Even then sometimes the system will hang if it tries to hit a device that is no longer there.

I prefer soft raid though, since I can take my disks to another machine without having to find the same host adapter from five years ago to recognize the array. Since it's retarded to buy a host adapter and put it in a 33MHz or 1x slot, I decided I will shut down if I have a disk failure and the machine hasn't frozen!

I always plug and remove drives (ATA and SATA) while the system is running. There is no problem with that.
But in Dos U need to have low level disk access (not BIOS level) to do it.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

This is generally 3 question on one:

1. The hardware is hotswap supported or can be damaged?
a: RTFM, but usually simply NO.
The most of the desktop drives (not enterprise class) not supports hotswap.
Based on my experience the most of the drives can survive it anyway, but the official answer is no except if the manufacturer says it is supported.
Additionally i have killed allready some drives with this plan....

2. The system can recognize drive after boot?
Under windows:
USB: yes
IDE: officially no, but some controller can do that with a little trick
SATA: some controller supports hotswap some not.

Linux:
USB: yes
IDE: no - i have never seen any solution so far
SATA: it depends on the controller and on kernel version

DOS:
USB: not supported.
IDE: OS don't care about it. (Not appears)
SATA: OS don't care about it. (Not appears)
(You can use drives only in phisycal level like the others sad.)

3. can you run any program wich can handle the drive in your case:
It depends on the program itself.
If can handle the drive without BIOS controll, maybe yes.

Janos