• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Hot Swap Software XP/2000?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

csaremnant

Registered
Joined
Nov 26, 2006
Location
Texas
Does anyone happen to know of any decent hot swap software for windows XP/2000? Possibly something that works in both?

I really dislike having to reboot my computer every time I wish to stick in a drive in my removable drive bay (yes it is hot swap capable). I have a trial of DriveSwap 32 but it doesn't seem stable enough for me to purchase a full copy. Just wondering if anyone had Idea's of something to try?
 
Do you own the professional version of windows XP?

If you do, and then its a driver issue. I am guessing you are using a SATA drive. Which then I would suggest you wait for Vista. Vista will support SATA natively.

This all should work like a USB. Which if you want to, you can find a USB->SATA drive adapter, and then use that as a solution. It will probably cost the same as the software, work very well, and also USB2 supports 300mbps which is the same as SATA.

Check and make sure your drivers (mobo, etc) are up to date... then see if that fixes the problem. You may have a hot-swappable Hard Drive but your SATA device may not be hotswappable.

Edit: Added If after researching your SATA controller, you find that it ISNOT hotswappable compatable (which I would assume it isnt), you CAN buy an Addition SATA controller card that is, or a USB -> SATA device that is. You will have to reasearch this for yourself.

MOST non-server based motherboards do not support native HD hotswapable devices.
 
Last edited:
Yes, I do own XP pro. I am not using SATA for this. It's an IDE bay. DriveSwap32 does the job, just not very well (more like not all the time). I was aware of the problem that most systems don't support hotswap. That is why I'm looking for software to do it.

Sorry, I neglected to mention it was an Ultra ATA device. I should also mention that this particular device is attached to it's own IDE controller not part of the motherboard. A PCI Silicon Image IDE controller. It is the only device on the master channel.

It was the only setup that was a viable solution for data transfers and system repairs that I am doing. I also ran into an interesting problem earlier where the device would cause the Grub boot loader to error out. But if I waited to activate the drive until I was at the windows boot loader, it worked fine. Still, I wouldn't have the problem if I had software that would allow me to activate the drive while in windows.
 
You can hotswap IDE drives safely... but you need to buy a PATA controller that supports it... You may also need to buy a hot swappable ATA drive, however I doubt this is the case, since the drivers for the controller should shut down and start the device properly. Any other solution is not a good Idea, and may lead to data error or complete drive failure. I have a feeling the problems your experiancing is due to the fact that the software is hacking current PATA controllers, triing to get them to stop the hard drive, so that you can remove them, then start them again.

Mike
 
You know I wouldn't be surprised if you were right about the way drive swap works. In fact, it would explain a great many things about some of the problems experienced at the job where I was shown the software.

From what I saw, it would force windows to recognize any and all new drives, as well as the drives that were already running. The licensed copy that my employer had would work most of the time, but eventually we had two computers, that had been using the software quite frequently fail due to hard drive problems.

One drive (IDE) the boot sector became completely corrupt and the other (SATA) failed to operate at all. Even if you tried to have it as a secondary drive, it caused the system to lock upon boot (the SATA). The IDE drive we were still able to salvage data.

Do you think that could of been caused by frequent driver "reboot" while the OS was still running?

My employer blamed me, said I had gotten a virus on the machines, but after he scanned the IDE he found nothing and could not prove it and did not understand what had happened, but he still held me responsible.

I always doubted it had been me that had done anything wrong to it. I just used the machine for what I was told to do, my employeer had set it up with holes in the firewalls so someone in Georgia could get in to help him with projects. Also, I had been gone for a week, before it happened. [Sorry side story, but it was an interesting experiance.]

Just wondering if you thought that might be the case? If it is, I'll go look for another controller, that would be the safest way, and until that point, I can live with a system reboot.
 
You cant just yank out the IDE controller Nor Shut off the power without preparing the disk. The software probably tries to force the condition of the drive to shut down. But the individual behavior of each IDE device, may be slightly different. Anyways, Generally speaking hotswapable SATA or IDE is used for SERVER tech, where system requirements require 100% uptime.

In school, we were challenged by a good techer to create a server with 100% up time with a very heavy load. We choose the computer industry leader at the time (Compaq) and one of their VERY large servers. It was a 255 cluster PC, with a seperate Hard Drive units, and redundant main control boards. On a single processor unit failure, the software would shut that processor off, and it would allow you to hotswap in a new one. It used multiple powersupplies all hotswappable, The Hard Drive contained 2 identical interfaces that would connect to the main computer to insure that if one of our Hard Drive Array control boards failed, it would use the second... It of course had RAID-5, with SCSI (hot swappable).

Every team except for mine failed at providing 100% true uninterupted service. They all failed at providing 2 seperate network device connections for redundancy, and they failed to purchase 2 UPS+Generators. Every single one of them who thought of a Generator failed to think what would happen if one failed. We also made sure that we had 2 seperate Airconditioning Units:)

We passed with a 100, everyone else... well, they didnt do as good as us... The machine and all the redundancy went over a cool 1 million, but it would handle the tasks associated with a major internet router, with room to spare for atleast 5 years (assuming the trend data was correct).

This is important because hot swappable was originally built for this perpose. It was built to handle Drive Arrays for Servers to prevent system downtime. It wasnt built for Desktop users, and for Hard Drives it doesnt make much sense to use these as hot swappable.

That is until they reached the Backup issues they are having now. Magnetic Tape backup has become impractical, and CD/DVD/HDDVD's are too small for most users, while not providing the reliability needed.

They now use USB 2.0 (or for the FREAKS firewire) Hard Drives that you plug in, back up, then remove from the system (and unplug).

These are important features, PSU failure, lightning, flood, etc may damage your computer devices, but it wont damage a Hard Drive in a waterproof safe:)

USB 2.0 is 300mbps (or so I was told... which means it may not be that value), and all hard drives (except server grade SATA drives and RAID array units (like mentioned above) only run at around 150mbps. So a USB hotswappable hard drive is a good backup unit.

The problem I have with these issues, is that Western Digital (the one company I have experiance with) only warenties these backup drives for 1 year. They also DONT seem to be built for regular usage... Just Backups.

My solution to you, is cut the crap... dont buy more useless software that can or cant work, and invest yourself in a true USB Add On (not Backup) hard drive.

This would be much easier then finding hot-swappable SATA or ATA devices, because like I said these cards are for servers, and generally RAID devices that cost more then the USB drives do.
 
GreenJelly said:
My solution to you, is cut the crap... dont buy more useless software that can or cant work, and invest yourself in a true USB Add On (not Backup) hard drive.

Unforunately that doesn't really help with what I'm trying to accomplish. I use my computer to fix other peoples. I can't just take a USB hard drive and remove the drive inside and stick someone elses in it.

For file Transfers, yeah, it works fine, as long as I'm just transfering the data between two of my 6 systems. There is actually quite alot of other solutions for me that I could use. I've thought about them. USB doesn't work very well if you're working on a 95/98 box. Sometimes it doesn't even function with a ME box either. Carrying around 12 CD's doesn't either.

Sorry, a USB Hard drive just doesn't hit all the nails for me. And I would be more willing to go out and purchase the server hardware for one system and make sure I can do everything I need to from my one system, than go out and spend the money to make all my systems 2000 capable and then buy a USB drive.

I also, can't exactly make every computer I work on 2000 capable, or tell the owners they need to upgrade because I can't do anything for them with their old system which has no reason to be upgraded. They'd just tell me that it wasn't worth that kind of money and they could live without it.
 
Last edited:
Back