Hi,

Is there a proper command that I should be running before unplugging a SATA hard drive from my motherboard's SATA port? Assuming my motherboard supports SATA hot-swapping of course, and that the drive has already been unmounted(or never mounted in the first place)

I notice that when I just unplug the drive and run "fdisk -l", it will hang there for 10-20s before completing. This seems to indicate that there's a duration where the PC is trying to detect the drive but it isn't there, then it times out.

So, is there a way for me to let the OS/PC know right before I unplug, that it should switch off the HDD and remove it from its list of detected devices?

I'm using Mandriva 2009 btw.

Thanks!

what about using the command umount?.. doesnt it help??

He said he unmounted it if necessary. Have you tried eject? It's not really meant for this, but I feel like it works.

By the way, hot-swapping is part of the SATA standard. It would be very strange if your motherboard didn't support it.

AFAIK some older chipsets that support SATA do not support hot-swap. Mine does though. It's an intel P45.

I will man eject and try it out. Thanks.

edit: just tried it out. It seems to just disconnect then reconnect it back straightaway.

I've also tried sdparm -C eject/unlock/stop /dev/sdb(where sdb is the drive) but nothing happens.