I am playing around with hot swapping scsi hard drives. My machine is an
IBM netfinity 5100. Generally I have not been able to hot swat my drives.
For the moment, I am not using RAID, I thought it better to try a simple
ext2 file system first. Perhaps hot swapping only works if the only
things accessed on the drives are raid areas. Anyway, my question is how
is hot swapping supposed to work as far as linux is concerned?
This is what I find....
1. If a drive is not present when the machine is booted, but is inserted
after the machine is up, it can't be mounted. (You get a message that the
device is not a valid block device.)
2. If a drive is present at boot time, and then later removed and then
later yet re-inserted, it cannot be mounted. This occurs even if the
drive was never accessed before re-inserting. (You get scsi disk error
messages.)
Is there some step I am missing? If not, I do not think "hot-swap" drives
work very well with linux, since any change in the disks requires
rebooting. Granted I did not have to power the machine off/on, but I do
seem to have to reboot. Perhaps I am just miss-understanding the meaning
of "hot-swap".
Best Regards,
Robert Laughlin
