hotswap sata drives not recognized / partition table not detected

pseudonomous · 2009-09-17 23:40:57

Hello Everybody,

I'm having some trouble, recently I bought to hot swap drive bays and moved two of my hardrives into them, but I can't seem to recognize the drives unless I boot with them in the "on" position, if I turn them on later, there's no indication that they are recognized at all by the system (by this I mean that there doesn't seem to be any new sd* or hd* devices appearing in /dev)

If I reboot with the drives configure in the "on" position, then arch recognizes them, but it can't read the partition table on one of the drives; it just shows up as, e.g /dev/sda and I don't see /dev/sda1; the drive has a single partition formatted with xfs (yes I've got xfsprogs installed), and I can recognize it if I boot into Parted Magic 3.5. I wonder if it's becuase I have BSD partition table? Anway, this isn't a huge issue, becuase I'm just going to transfer the data onto an external usb drive, reformat and transfer the data back.

I really do want to figure out a solution to the hotswapping problem though, because I don't want to have reboot if I want to hotswap the drives; this completely defeats the purpose of having hot-swappable drives.

Thanks for any help you can give,
-Pseudonomous

Edit 1: Potentially useful data:

I've got an ATI SB700/SB800 sata controller according to lspci

Edit 2:

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to contact AMD for tech-support, they provide no information on these Sata controllers, I have, however, contacted my motherboard's manufacturer. If anybody knows how to get in touch with AMD/ATI support, that would also probably be helpful.

Last edited by pseudonomous (2009-09-18 00:56:28)

fukawi2 · 2009-09-18 04:56:22

I believe you can only do this if your motherboard supports hot-swapping since the BIOS has to recognise the drive before it can tell the O/S what drive(s) are present and most BIOS firmware only does this at boot.

Have you confirmed that your BIOS supports hot-swapping?

pseudonomous · 2009-09-18 22:41:01

I've heard back from my motherboard manufacturor, Biostar, they claim my board supposts Sata hotswap; I guess I may have to switch some Bios settings (the only one I can think of that matter is the "plug & play OS" toggle, unless hotswapping is burried somewhere in sub-menus), I'll see if that works when I get home.

azleifel · 2009-09-18 23:28:21

I followed the wiki article (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AHCI) to set up sata hotswap on my Biostar TP45D2-A7 motherboard and it works well. The BIOS settings for AHCI were under IDE/SATA Configuration.

pseudonomous · 2009-09-19 01:25:08

I think I've got it working now; thanks for everyone's help.

There was in fact some BIOS settings that I needed to change hidden under "southbridge configuration". I needed to enable AHCI and disable "SATA / IDE combined controller" or something like that.

I'm also having some trouble with my fstab setup since the hotswap sata drives are in a raid1 array, and the system doesn't like it when I boot without it present; I'll see if I can figure out a way around that; if not it probably belongs in another thread, anyway,.

Again, thanks for your help!

Arch Linux

#1 2009-09-17 23:40:57

hotswap sata drives not recognized / partition table not detected

#2 2009-09-18 04:56:22

Re: hotswap sata drives not recognized / partition table not detected

#3 2009-09-18 22:41:01

Re: hotswap sata drives not recognized / partition table not detected

#4 2009-09-18 23:28:21

Re: hotswap sata drives not recognized / partition table not detected

#5 2009-09-19 01:25:08

Re: hotswap sata drives not recognized / partition table not detected

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