Patrick Mackey wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I too am interested in being able to do this. With IDE hard drives being
> inexpensive and holding a lot of data it makes sense to use them as backup
> mediums. It would be nice to be able to hot swap IDE drives.
> 
> Can the IDE bus be refreshed or is it a limitation of the OS, BIOS or IDE
> controller?

I've seen several OSes running on plain PCs where it is possible to 
detect and use an IDE HDD connected on the fly. This includes WinXP 
where one simply "scans for hardware changes", and the HDD gets detected 
and mounted; on removal, one the user selects to uninstall the hardware, 
in which case the OS tries to cleanly unmount the volume(s) and removes 
the device entry. In BeOS, one "rescans" the IDE bus to detect the new 
HDD, and on removal, one simply unmounts any volumes by hand, and the 
drive is ready to be physically removed (preferably followed by another 
bus rescan). So, there exist even multiple approaches to this in 
alternative OSes.

mortee