Getting SATA drive to be hot swappable

[ComputerRepairTech]

Hot-swap for sata is a fucntion of AHCI not if you have esata or not.

I only mentioned that because the boards i could never get hot swapping to work on didnt have an eSata port. I am fairly certain that some of the older sata controllers did not allow you to hot swap at all.

 

[shamrin]

I just swapped out another board for a new Asus M5A97-EVO the old board was an M4A785TD. I've got a similar set-up with a couple of 2.5 bays and 1 3.5 bay in the front to use for hot-swapping.

I haven't had enough time to test whether it is different on the new board, but I did notice some peculiarities of hot-swapping under Windows 7 with the old installation, these are:

• Windows 7 will not recognise certain drives that are inserted into the bay. These drives appear fine in every way but you cannot hot-swap them.
• Windows 7 will not recognise certain drives sometimes. For some physical drives it is a crap-shoot whether hot-swap will work on any particular day (or moon phase or whatever). Some drives appear to "deteriorate" where they would previously be recognised, but no longer.
• Windows 7 often does not notice that a drive has been pulled from its bay. You can still access folders under Explorer. The only way to "dismount" the drive is to ask Explorer to open some file on the imaginary drive and wait about 30 seconds for it to time-out trying.

I've never found anyone who has solved these issues (including me, but not for lack of trying) and I conclude that the Windows 7 AHCI hot-swapping code was written by the same guys who wrote the Troubleshooter Help screens for Windows XP and Bluescreen error messages in all flavours of Windows.

Assuming that your drives are recognised when you boot with them inserted (if not, the problem you have is a completely different one than we've been talking about here) then I would be checking in BIOS to make sure that the SATA ports you are using are set to AHCI, they are often settable on a per port or per port group basis. I would also try a few different (formatted) drives you have around. I have another machine that refuses to assign drive letters to some USB hot-swapped drives, so just in case you've got something like that, make sure you are checking in Disk Management, not just Windows Explorer for the inserted drive.

 

[Bigj]

Reason # 74782949037287 of why I love linux and do not regret dropping windows from my main machine some 6 years ago.

To the OP : take one of the machine in question and boot a live cd for ubuntu. Open a terminal and type 'tail -f /var/log/messages' or 'tail -f /var/log/everything' not sure which on the latest ubuntu uses. Plug up your sata drive and watch that log file scroll I bet it works just fine.

To put some kind of answer to this, it is just outside of what windows was designed to do IMO. Microsoft did not expect a user of windows 7/vista to be hot swapping hard drives around so the support is just questionable at best, and dangerous at least. Plug a drive that is extremely bad up to a windows machine and prepare to flip the quarter of fate if you will destroy your OS or not

 

[Wilkins IT Solutions]

You said you tried some registry changes, which ones did you try.

Edit: and what happens if you plug in a sata hard drive after you logged into windows (not unplugged then replug but just plugging one in that wasnt initially there on power on)

Edit: try it in the same sata port that you had the optical drive in

I tried writing the capabilities flag for the harddrive to a value of 4 for hot swap capability, I also tried to add it to the USB storage settings in the registry

Putting in another Sata disk auto adds the disk to the system and makes it HOT SWAPPABLE.......... not fully but the HotSwap app can remove the device and I need to "scan for hardware changes" in order to re-add the harddrive

There is some kind of system data apparently on this 2TB drive even though I did not install Windows to it making it not hot-swappable. I took it out before I booted up and "improper boot media" came up and the BIOS Boot Menu would not show my main SSD harddrive.

 

[PCX]

Do you absolutely have to run Windows?

 

[Wilkins IT Solutions]

Adobe creative suite is apart of my software repertoire so yes I would need to run windows because I am not running a mac.

 

[PCX]

What about just investing into some bigger hard drives or a small server to store your data on?

 

[Wilkins IT Solutions]

I have an FTP server as well as about 5TB of storage. I like the classic heel-toe-express, somethings die hard!

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

wasnt there something in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\ to attempt to force a drive to be listed as removable?

 

[Wilkins IT Solutions]

Yes you take the capabilities variable and set it to 4 (removeable) instead of 0. This cannot be done while Windows is running. Ontop of that theres some kind of system file running on the HDD in reserved space, ill just keep the 2TB in the computer and get another one and use that for the hot-swappable.

 

[PCX]

Yes you take the capabilities variable and set it to 4 (removeable) instead of 0. This cannot be done while Windows is running. Ontop of that theres some kind of system file running on the HDD in reserved space, ill just keep the 2TB in the computer and get another one and use that for the hot-swappable.

There is always USB HDD docking stations.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

and for auto detection on replug did u disable lpm on that sata port?

Edit: I can't seem to find how to do this on amd chipsets lol

 

[Wilkins IT Solutions]

I have an old AMD Chipset that runs an Athalon X2 and it hot swaps no problem, the application works cleaner than the windows hot swap anyways so its all good. I have all AHCI protocols enabled in the BIOS, i didnt see an IPM setting

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

thats an L, LPM. I dunno enough about AMD to advise you on that one unfortunately.

Edit: Saw someone mention in a post that simply disabling (setting to never) the "Turn off hard disks" feature in power options will disable LPM...probably true but cant confirm.