Removing removable ATA hard drives

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Thursday 05 October 2006 11:00, Olivier Nicole wrote:

[Power down a drive bay using its built-in keyswitch and pull the disk without 
dropping the whole box]
> Unless you need to move that disk from one machine to another, fix it
> in your server, keep the tray for future testing when you will have
> more time... (if we ever have more time in the present life :)

I should probably have said: we don't currently have offsite backups (we've 
exceeded the capacity of our tape device and our budget), and the quick-fix 
solution is dumping to this hard drive and then pulling it out and taking it 
home. As such the removability is key to its intended function. I can't keep 
dropping the main fileserver to fiddle with it, and the alternative in terms 
of testing is to set up another box with the particular 4.9-STABLE snapshot 
running on this server (to eliminate OS version-related variable effects).

I'm hoping some kind person here will save me the trouble by saying, from 
experience, either ``yes, you're on the right track but you need to do x, y 
and z before pulling/replacing the drive cassette'', or ``no, run away 
screaming before your server room goes down in flames''.

Jonathan