Eject your hard disks.



  • Apparently, on vista you can eject any of your hard disks, including your RAID setup (twice!).


     



  • I used to have a similar behaviour with the Ubuntu live-CD. If I unmounted any partition, it would tell me to "not eject the drive until the operation is done" or words to that effect. But the "drive" was an internal IDE drive.

    I wonder how can I "eject" a hard drive. Will it break through my case?











  • @Renan_S2 said:

    I used to have a similar behaviour with the Ubuntu live-CD. If I unmounted any partition, it would tell me to "not eject the drive until the operation is done" or words to that effect. But the "drive" was an internal IDE drive.

    I wonder how can I "eject" a hard drive. Will it break through my case?

    There are constructions for removable IDE hard drive units, commonly used for large-scale disk imaging. They're typically mounted as a 3.5" drive in a 5.25" bay, usually with an ejectable caddy. However, I doubt it was thought out that far; the software probably just can't tell the difference between media types.



  • @asuffield said:

    There are constructions for removable IDE hard drive units, commonly used for large-scale disk imaging. They're typically mounted as a 3.5" drive in a 5.25" bay, usually with an ejectable caddy. However, I doubt it was thought out that far; the software probably just can't tell the difference between media types.

    In windows - no idea, but as for linux - it was thought out that far. With latest kernels you've got ide, pci, cpu and memory hotswaping possibility, so it will try to turn on whatever it can from this list. OTOH I think that's probably mainboard reporting problem - I doubt that any home-class mobo would know anything about hotswaping anything apart from usb.



  • @viraptor said:

    @asuffield said:

    There are constructions for removable IDE hard drive units, commonly used for large-scale disk imaging. They're typically mounted as a 3.5" drive in a 5.25" bay, usually with an ejectable caddy. However, I doubt it was thought out that far; the software probably just can't tell the difference between media types.

    In windows - no idea, but as for linux - it was thought out that far.

    I'm betting that this message is from gnome, not linux, and was written by some gnome-muppet who was thinking about USB sticks.



  • @Renan_S2 said:

    I used to have a similar behaviour with the Ubuntu live-CD. If I unmounted any partition, it would tell me to "not eject the drive until the operation is done" or words to that effect. But the "drive" was an internal IDE drive.

    I wonder how can I "eject" a hard drive. Will it break through my case?

    Ubuntu seems to dumb down their disk management way too much. The last time I used an ubuntu livecd, I connected my usb flash drive to it, which is configured in a somewhat interesting way (3 partitions, one vfat, one ext2, and one with LUKS encryption). But it wouldn't let me mount or unmount those partitions manually: it mounted everything immediately, and when I told it to unmount one of them, it unmounted everything and refused to acknowledge they exist anymore, let alone mount them, until i unplug and reconnect the drive.
     

    For the ejectable hard drive part, the system probably knows it's not removable, but someone probably forgot to check the removable flag in the HAL properties, or, more likely, didn't even know HAL storage devices had a removable property.



  • @asuffield said:

    I'm betting that this message is from gnome, not linux, and was written by some gnome-muppet who was thinking about USB sticks.

    Gnome gets info from hal - hal is linux. Besides what's the difference between removable disk and USB stick? It's basically the same...

    I blame incorrect mobo information. My disk says "storage.removable = true" in lshal even though it's not-removable laptop one. Probably they just set the same parameters in every model in series to save the time. It doesn't break anything after all.



  • My XP lets me eject one of my two hard drives. I guess it's most likely the motherboard reporting the drive as ejectable. This didn't happen with my old motherboard.



  • @viraptor said:

    @asuffield said:

    I'm betting that this message is from gnome, not linux, and was written by some gnome-muppet who was thinking about USB sticks.

    Gnome gets info from hal - hal is linux.

    No it isn't. hal is a userland program - and anyway, it's another gnome component, and it does not generate this message. Some gnome component will be responsible for misinterpreting the response.




  • @JasonHise said:

    Apparently, on vista you can eject any of your hard disks, including your RAID setup (twice!).

    It's not "eject" so much as it is "stop the controller device".

    And you can do it on XP too, for RAID and SCSI controllers.

    I notice you don't have any bog-standard IDE harddrives - they wouldn't show up if you did.




  • Serial SCSIs and SATA are both hot-swappable, and you can tell Windows to cache writes to disks rather than writing immediately, so it seems like a sensible option to have them there.

    And the nForce RAIDs are the Real WTF here. You'd think that they're OS-transparent, given that you set them in the BIOS, but then bam! Linux can't figure out how to read them because it sees both HDs separately. I still can't get Fedora to run without unplugging my RAID on install.



  • Many server chassis have hot swappable hard drive bays, so that's not so much a wtf.  Assuming C: is your boot drive though, I'm a bit surprised to see it there...



  • Then it's probably not true hwRAID but all done in the drivers. It wasn't called "nvRAID" by any chance? http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#nvidia
     



  • @viraptor said:

    In windows - no idea, but as for linux - it was thought out that far. With latest kernels you've got ide, pci, cpu and memory hotswaping possibility, so it will try to turn on whatever it can from this list. OTOH I think that's probably mainboard reporting problem - I doubt that any home-class mobo would know anything about hotswaping anything apart from usb.
    SATA has been designed for hotswapping since beginning, but early controllers didn't implement that properly. You also don't get hotswapping if you're running your SATA controllers in IDE mode - they have to be run in native or AHCI mode. The nForce4 motherboard I bought almost 3 years ago came with a bracket and cables to let me connect 2 SATA disks externally, but the manual warned that the controller had to be running in native mode, and special drivers had to be installed for hotswap to work safely. With those drivers (which were quite unstable at the beginning), I also had the option to safely remove my boot drive.



  • @ender said:

    safely [hotswap] my boot drive.

    I have trouble seeing how this works. System files in use are copied into RAM or something? 



  • @dhromed said:

    @ender said:
    safely [hotswap] my boot drive.
    I have trouble seeing how this works. System files in use are copied into RAM or something?
    I only had the option - if I tried using it, it gave the usual "Device is currently in use, try again later".


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