A8V IDE hot-swap.... when did that happen?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Immuno
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Immuno

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 said:
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
Click to expand...

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 said:
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..
Click to expand...

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!

:o)

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
 
Mercury said:
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
Click to expand...

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) :o)) -
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
 
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