How do you add drives without rebooting?

How do you add drives without rebooting?

in general, you don't add drives without powering down.

I used to do this all the time in 2003 server and xp.

 

What EXACTLY did you do to add the drives to XP? I would like to know how to do this properly without risk of damaging the drives or the controller, I have not seen a procedure for doing this without specific hardware that made allowances for hot plugging drives. Also, how do you make the OS aware of the new drive?

 

The only drives I've been able to successfully mount and unmount on a windows OS are USB and Firewire, and neither of those are applicable in this instance.

At the bare minimum, you're going to have to stop the array to add a new disk.  What do you gain by not rebooting at that point?

Well on XP, I simply plug in the power, then the sata2 cable.

Then I go into device manager, scan for hardware changes, then I go to disk mgmt and resscan disks.

I have been doing this ever since sata1 first came out. Never had a problem with any of my drives doing this.

 

I also do this with aix, but that of course is a different architecture.

 

I often move 3-4 drives raid 5 software from one box to another to move large amounts of data.

 

All this to say, irregardless of the reason I want to do it, is there a way to rescan the sata bus to pickup new drives?

It is not the end of the world if not. I own a pro lic of unraid, and I am learning what it can and cannotddo.