How do you Hot Swap drives in XP?

I have removable caddys for three SATA hard drives and I want to use them for rotating clone backups. The caddy has a switch to power down the drive, then I swap them, and switch the drive power back up. I can only get Windows to recognize the new drive by rebooting. Otherwise the old one shows up in Explorer even though it was replaced. I used to have a software program that would allow me to mount/dismount IDE drives but it doesn't see the SATA drives. What's the procedure for hot swapping SATA drives in Windows XP?

 

The full sata spec is not yet implimented in Windows.
Have you tried using device manager? Right click on your computers name in DM and click on "scan for hardware changes"

 

Have you tried view-refresh?

 

Static:
I rescanned in Device Manager, the screen flashed, and the new SATA drive designation appeared where the old one was, so far so good...

MPSAN:
Then I went to Explorer and did another refresh (it didn't show any changes at all right after I swapped drives). Explorer DID show the new volume label on the drive! But when I clicked on it, it said "F:\ is not accessible"

I'm also concerned about flushing the write cache. For "removable" devices (like USB) Windows has a system tray icon to close the device before removal, not so for SATA hard drives. I could uncheck the "use write buffer on this drive" but that would degrade overall performance for the drive, no?

Any other suggestions??

 

The removable device from task tray is driver dependant, check your sata chipset vendor for updated drivers, they may have improved drivers that support hot swapping. I have a promise add on card that supports hot swap, that being said windows still springs a leak / coughs up a hairball from time to time.
Yes you will lose performance by removing the write buffer usage, like stated above check with your sata vendor for drivers and you not have to worry about it, cause it certainly sounds like your driver does not support swapping at all.

 

In addition to the above responses

I have just waited a couple of minutes of no drive activity to swap the drives with no ill effect. Just don't pull it out with a lit activity lite.

Try Start> computer>double click the removed drives icon and an explorer screen with the new drive contents should show.

In the past I have mistakenly pulled out and inserted ide pata drives hot, without any ill effects, but as you know this is not recommended.