Hi all,

New to this forum but old to computers. This problem has me stumped. I have some SATA hard drives that I wish to "hot swap" between three of my computers.

I have caddy-less bays installed in all computers. They are hooked up directly to the SATA Main board ports. And their power is being supplied by the ATX power supply with dedicated SATA power cables.

I know how this is supposed to work and have installed these things in other computers without a hitch.

Normally, I would plug in a drive .. and "new hardware found" would pop up from the tray followed quickly by "Your new hardware is ready to use". Of course the drives were all pre formatted and are using the NTFS system.

I can have the drive properties set for either throughput or enhanced drive swapping. Throughput requires that I click on the device icon in the system tray to "stop" the device prior to removal. Enhanced drive swapping allows you to not have to "stop" the device and let's you just pull it without stopping. (this has to do with right ahead stuff etc.)

Now the problem. I have two computers that I just installed these hot swap sata bays into. And they will not work. Putting a drive into the bay does nothing unless I go to computer management and re-activate the drive. Then I can read it. BUT if I remove it, that drive continues to show up. And of course since it's really not there anymore, any kind of browsing on it creates errors. If I try re-inserting the drive at that point, it crashes the system.

And here's the puzzling part. If I take any of the drives that won't work correctly and plug them into ANOTHER computer, they will work as normal. THEN removing that drive from the working computer and putting into the original (where it didn't work) ... suddenly it WORKS.

The "good PC system" must be recognizing the drive as a newly plugged in removable one, and must write something to the drive itself .. some kind of stamp initializing it so it can work as a hot swap drive.

Once it's been initialized (my wording) on the good system it then works everywhere. But two of my computers will not do this.

The simple solution is to take all the drives and insert them once into the working system PC. Once that is done then they will work everywhere.

I've been struggling with this for about a month now, trying to find out what is different between the systems. They are all Windows XP Pro systems .. up to date and don't have any other issues.

To summarize, Hot Swapping in these two computers only works after any hard drive is first hot swapped at least one time on a working system first.

Hi Rich A

Welcome to PCHF

Can I just ask, is all this hot swapping absolutely neccessary?
If it's all in an office environment then why don't you set up a LAN and configure permissions on files and folders.
If it's not an office environment then I would consider setting the drive properties back to normal, stopping the device, rather than the enhanced (just pull it) setting.
You can't be in that much of a rush that you need to yank `em out before stopping them surely.

Hi and thanks for the reply. First, it isn't a question of "stopping" the device. Because it doesn't work correctly the device (inserted hard drive) doesn't show up at all. I can't "stop" the device. The only way to get it to work correctly so I can use the drive is to shut down the computer, insert the drive, re-start the computer, and then re-activate the drive it finds during boot up. Then to use the drive on another computer for another backup I have to shut down the computer, remove the drive and restart it. It's a real pain when you back up often and have three computers to do.

One of the computers in question is a dedicated home theater PC. It has been running 24/7 for a couple years. There is no keyboard / mouse or other input device on it. (I plug in USB versions when I need to do maint. etc) It has four tuners (two digital and two analog) and records a LOT of shows for me. I need to be able to easily back up that system, without having to shut down and reboot etc.

Also all the computers are part of a gigabit LAN. And each has a very large amount of files to back up. I'm talking about a lot of GB. Even across a gigabit LAN this takes hours. Directly writing to a SATA II 300 MB/s HD cuts this down to around 22 minutes.

It also makes for better organisation for me. I have one 500 GB SATA drive that contains folders for each computer's backup. Once week I want to be able to just go to each computer and plug in the back up drive and then when it's finished remove it and do the next computer.

What I have been doing with the HTPC is too time involved. I don't like shutting down that system at all at any time either.

This is how I have to do it now with the HTPC, just because the hot-swap doesn't work.

1.Dig out the USB mouse and keyboard, and plug them in.
2. Start up the home theater (turn on the projector, room lights etc).
3. Shut down all the PVR and multimedia software that is running.
4. Shut down Windows.
5. Insert the drive
6. Restart windows with the drive inserted.
7. Re-activate the drive (I shouldn't have to do this)
8. Run the backup program from the HTPC application menu
9. Shut down the computer
10. remove the drive
11. Restart the computer
12. remove the keyboard and mouse
13. Shut down the projector, lighting etc.
14. I'm done.

The way I "should" be able to do this.

1. Plug in the drive.
2. Go to any TV in the house and with my remote select the HTPC channel.
3.Run the backup program from the HTPC application menu
4. Remove the drive
5. I'm done

But regardless of time and such ... the point is that my systems won't recognise a hot swap drive until it's been initialized in some other working system. For some reason NONE of my systems work. So I have to trot over to a buddy's place and have him simply insert my HD into his system and remove it. Once that is done, the drives work as they should in all my systems. I just know there is something common to all my systems where they don't recognise any plug in drive. Unless it's first been plugged into a "working" system. This is a puzzle ..