SATA Hot Swap Drive Bay Stopped Working

A few months back my boot drive died on me. I got another drive, reinstalled XP and off I went again. Well, I have a SATA hot swap drive bay. Before the crash it worked fine. I don’t remember ever installing any driver or utility for it when I first installed it (when I originally built the system). Well, it stopped working, kind of. If I shut down XP, swap the drive and turn the system back on it will see the different drive. So it swaps, just not hotly. So, what might be going on? I did not modify anything in my BIOS. The only thing different in my setup is having to manually download the XP updates since MS has stopped it’s support. I am at a loss.

The problem is not the dock but the SATA controller it’s connected to. Check for newer drivers for it.

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Are Seagate and Maxtor External drives hot swappable?

External Drives Hot Swap Yes, with the following recommendations:

Never unplug any eSATA, 1394, or USB device that is being actively accessed by the operating system (such as during a file copy).

  • Unplugging a device while it is being used may result in a system crash and the loss of the ability to recover the data already written to the drive.
  • For Macintosh – If you want to unplug an External Drive you must first drag the mounted drive icon to the trash to dismount it. After the drive is dismounted then it can be unplugged.
    For Windows – If you wish to disconnect an External Drive, you must use the “Safely Remove”  or “Unplug and Eject Hardware” utility located in the Windows Task Bar ( identified by the Green Arrow Icon located close to the clock on your desktop).
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