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Posted by Mark F on September 14, 2008, 8:55 pm
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wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:05:05 -0400, Barry Watzman
>
> >It's not a good practice, but the hard drive should be off in either
> >Hibernate or Standby.
> >
> >
> >Salvador Freemanson wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >> I use a separate hard disk when my son uses my laptop (he didn't bring
> >> his own with him), as I don't want to catch his viruses, him to mess up
> >> my work, install godknowswhat on my machine, etc.
> >> It takes only a few seconds to change the disk, once the computer is
> >> powered down.
> >> But I've just found out that my son doesn't always bother to power it
> >> down. A couple of times he changed the disks while it was in hibernation
> >> mode. And I suspect even on occasions when the machine was just in standby.
> >>
> >> Can any harm come to my laptop through this? On one occasion I got the
> >> famous blue screen for a few moments before the computer went through
> >> the coming out of hibernation process.
> >>
> >> Cheers
> >>
> >>
> >** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
>
> Changing a hardrive in Standby is NOT a good idea, as the computer is
> on, with information in RAM. If you swap the hard drive in Standby
> state, it will be screwed up when starting up. And, since it is on
> technically, there could be potential for electrical damage to the
> laptop.
I agree that changing the drive from Standby is bad, but I think
there is a good chance that the disks may be physically find
but the data is in an unknown state on both of the disks, which is
worse than having two disks that you immediately know are broken.
I wouldn't worry about the chance of electrical damage, although there
is some chance.
A bigger problem is that the data on the disk is in an unknown
state, so the removed disk may not have all of the data on it that
you think it does. (There is a good chance that the file system
meta-data will be consistent with NTFS, but their still can be
inconsistencies and files lost since they weren't closed.)
Another possibility is what happens to the disk that was inserted.
If the system doesn't boot when after the disks are switched
the inserted disk might get writes that were meant for the first disk.
(I would expect that the hardware would reboot in the original
poster's configuration, if one tried the same thing with switching
eSATA drives there could be problems if the disk switch didn't cause
an error that the operating system sees and therefore puts the
drive logically offline.)
>
> In Hibernation, XP writes all information in RAM to the hard drive,
> then shuts down completely. So it is safe to change the drive, start
> the computer, shut it down again and swap back your drive. It will
> start up from the last hiberanted mode.
I do this with no problems that I am aware of. (In other words:
hibernate, switch disks, boot, hibernate, switch disk back, boot.
No problems found on either disk when looked at later.)
>
> samurai.
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