1 Topic by fclauson

  • fclauson
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  • Registered: 2007-07-17
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Topic: Swapping drives after booting

Hi all

I have very limited knowledge of Lynix (gained some xx years ago on Unix)

I have a laptop (Toshiba Tecra 9100) - which only supports two internal drives - I have created the bootable CD - but want to know if I can boot up with the CD in the second Bay - and then once booted swap out the CD for a second hard drive so I can do my copy and imaging activites.

Is this possible - is there a way of telling the op sys to re-scan for changed drives etc - I have tryed it but upon swapping the system still thinks there is a CD there

Francis

2 Reply by chooch

  • chooch
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  • Registered: 2007-06-14
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Re: Swapping drives after booting

Greetings Francis,
I can answer on the first question, but not for Linux. If your running a cd iso, it should load into the ram, or swap on the primary hdd. Then you can pull out the cd and go for the second hdd.

I know this will work for BeleniX and Menuet64, but I don't know about Linux. (I bet Debian does it; Knoppix too.)

The second part of your question will require someone much wiser than I, ha believe me, there are plenty on this forum that are.

If you used Unix before, you might consider OpenSolaris; all the good stuff, none of the bad stuff. (I don't think Solaris will work like you want, but BeleniX does and its built on the Solaris kernel)

Have fun,
Chooch

3 Reply by class413

  • class413
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  • Registered: 2007-05-25
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Re: Swapping drives after booting

Knoppix has a boot option to load the entire CD on RAM, so that you can take the cd out of the drive and use the drive for other cds.
To do that, at least 1 MB  of RAM is required, given that the cd content is 700 MB. For imaging applications, large RAM is usually needed, so you need at least 1,5 GB or 2 GB RAM.

Nevertheless, I wonder how you do to take out the cdrom and connect the hard drive without powering down the computer. "Hot swap" is possible with USB devices and SCSI devices. Even SATA devices that would be hot-swappable according the specification, they don't in practice, because they need a 3rd voltage supply that most power supplies don't provide!

Anyway, if you can hot-swap the devices, there is the automount function that could do the work. An exemple I found is there:
http://mntd.bambach.biz/
I think the best is to look how Knoppix searches to mount devices, so the Knoppix forum would be ideal for what you ask!
With Knoppix and 2 GB RAM I already did photo processing with GIMP.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***