Carl wrote:
Paul wrote:
Carl wrote:
I have two PCs.

The one with MSI motherboard does not Hot Swap SATA Hard drives.

The one with Gigabyte P4 Titan does Hot Swap SATA hard drives.
(P4M800)
Not a clue about Hot Swap is on the box.

How can I tell before choosing a new motherboard if it supports SATA
Hot Swap?

Carl

See the section "Advanced Host Controller Interface" here, where
the existence of AHCI equates to Hot Plug support. This isn't strictly
true, as hot plug was evident before ACHI drivers existed. But for the
purposes of dealing with modern motherboards, it is a good start
at identifying a motherboard that might support hot plug.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ata

The trouble with this is, no one in the industry is going to
expend an extra line of ink in their documentation, to say
it is supported and part of their hardware. So you have to
assume it is present, when you see something like AHCI.

Before the AHCI driver came out, one assumption was that
a SATA 300MB/sec interface and its associated driver, would
support hot plug. The state of development, when SATA 150MB/sec
interfaces were the norm, was that hot plug wasn't included.
The connectors have always been designed to support it (the
connectors have staggered pins for proper interconnect
sequence.)

You can blame the organization that invented SATA, for
the sorry state of feature identification.

Paul

Paul,
Thanks to that lead, I started more research. The Wikipedia page also
mentions this: "Adapters exist which can convert a 4-pin Molex connector
to a SATA power connector. However, because the 4-pin Molex connectors
do not provide 3.3 V power, these adapters provide only 5 V and 12 V
power and leave the 3.3 V lines unconnected."

I was using the power adapter on the "failing" machine.

If I had not handled that issue first, all the rest of my trials would
have been fruitless.

I finally located the CD that came with the MSI P4M800 motherboard

After much trial and error (mostly error) of trying this and that, I
found that...

1. Changed the BIOS setting from IDE to RAID, and
2. Loading from the CD, the RAID controller, and RAID management tool,
now hot swap works.

But of course I am not using RAID.

Carl

It sucks having to figure this stuff out by doing experiments. But
it is kinda traditional for motherboard manuals to not document
all the various ways of setting up disks and drivers, to get
an OS installed and so on.

Paul