Re: Hot swap IDE

From: Andre Tomt (andre@tomt.net)
Date: Fri Oct 06 2000 - 20:13:26 EST


I know, replying "to the wrong person" is a little weak, but I lost the
original post in a hardware lockup on my workstation (2.4-test9, latest DRI
CVS code, mga HALlib), so this has to go. And please forgive me about
posting from MS Outlook Express this time, it's only temp :-)

> On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Mitchell Hicks wrote:
<snip>
> > there does not seem to be a command to reset the IDE buss(this is
mentioned
> > in the raid howto's) can i compile the IDE drivers as a module and
> > remove/install then while the system is running on the raid(i think
not)...
> > I'm booting from a 20 meg none raid drive (to be raid 1 in final
production)

A utility called "idectl" is bundled in the contrib directory of the hdparm
source. With this utility you can disable, enable and reset IDE channels
without rebooting or doing module inserts/removals. But I have to warn you -
it's highly experimental.

At home I have a RAID 1 setup, two IDE drives and one SCSI in my
coda/nfs/smb server. It's set up to have a spare MBR/bootblock on all
drives, so the BIOS can do failover to the next drive on failure. I have a
lilo.conf for each drive, with some tricks to make lilo happy when
installing the bootloader. It's working like a charm, using a RAID patch for
Linux 2.2 (2.4 RAID code mostly)

I did test hotswapping (alough the chipset or disks does not support it
native, standard VIA UDMA33 chipset), pulling random drives while the server
was running, with raidhotadd and idectl, it went along without a hitch. I DO
NOT hotswap IDE drives usually, this was only a test of what the setup was
able to handle. :)

--
André Tomt
andre@tomt.net

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