[Techtalk] Hot swap drive?

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 07:35:13AM +0000 or thereabouts, Conor Daly wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 11:33:34AM -0700 or thereabouts, Akkana Peck wrote:
> > 
> > just wanted to be able to insert the drive on a day when I intended
> > to do a backup, then remove it for storage after shutdown.
> > 
> > Even that didn't work.  It turned out that the BIOSes on both of
> > my desktop machines weren't good at dealing with IDE changes like
> > disks appearing and disappearing.  I thought that would happen
> 
> AFAIK, my existing desktop motherboard is happy enough with such things.
> I've certainly swapped disks in and out when playing 'space shuffle' without
> difficulty.  
> 
> For home use, I'll probably go with the mobile rack once I'm happy that the
> machine can dance the 'bios disk shuffle'...

Update.  I bought the mobile rack and a 120Gb HDD.  BIOS has no problem with
the changes however, linux did!  I put an entry in my fstab for the disk so
I just had to do 'mount mount/point' but when I booted after removing the
disk I got a '/dev/hdd1 cannot be found.  Dropping you to a shell, press
Control-D to exit' at fsck time.  I removed the fstab entry and all was
well.  I'll have to figure out how to tell the boot sequence to be happy if
the disk isn't there...

Ah, look!  man fstab says:

-A    Walk through the /etc/fstab file and try to check all file  sys-
      tems in one run.  This option is typically used from the /etc/rc
      system initalization file,  instead  of  multiple  commands for
      checking a single file system.
                                                                                
      filesystems  will be
      checked  in  the  order  specified  by the fs_passno (the sixth)
      field in the /etc/fstab  file.   Filesystems  with  a fs_passno
      value  of 0 are skipped and are not checked at all.

So all I have to do is set fs_passno = 0 for my removable drive.  Now, does
this mean that it will never get checked (not even every 180 days or 32
mounts whichever comes first)?

Anyhow, for the first time in about 5 years, I have a backup... :-)

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly,                   Please avoid sending me 
Met Eireann, Glasnevin Hill,  Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Dublin 9, Ireland             http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
Ph +3531 8064276 Fax +3531 8064247


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