Never ceases to amaze

[Brian Kelsay]

About the only time I've tried Hot Plug is when I forget to plug in the
drive on a test system or slaving a drive with a dead/trashed Windows OS.
And i only try this when I'm just getting the memory count on boot.
Brian

----- Original Message -----

> What?!  You mean you rebooted and passed up a perfectly good chance to
> play a game of hardware roulette?
>
> I remember hot swapping hard drives for about two years.  Yes, I was
> rolling the dice and doing hardware changes in the fast lane.  Finally I
> got to experience the even electronic engineers call "SCR latchup."  Its
> when the voltage levels of the inputs are biased at the right place before
> the voltage supply rails come up and the silicon junctions simulate an SCR
> and clamp down on the supply, cooking the chip and possibly the
> motherboard.
>
> One fateful day, it happened.  I noticed the drive I just plugged in
> wasn't readable.  I took out the secondary IDE channel and it did
> something interesting two drives attatched to it.  The motherboard could
> never use that channel again.  Those two drives would work, but never with
> each other.  But it did cost me a reboot.  And an IDE channel.
>
> http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/35-05/latchup/
>
> --
> Programming C shells by the sea shore since 1994.
> http://dattaway.org
>