Can I swap disks while my laptop is in standby?

Avoriaz

Can I put my laptop in standby mode (or maybe hibernation mode), swap the disk for another, do some work on that disk and then resume from standby on the first disk?



I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop with an 80gb disk.

The disk sits in a caddy that slots into the side of the laptop.

I have a spare 80gb disk and caddy.

Swapping between disks is a very simple process. Power off, remove the single retaining screw, pull out the caddy with disk1, put in the other caddy with disk2, secure it in place with the single screw and power back on again.

Windows XP is installed on both disks. I plan to set up disk2 for my wife to use, leaving disk1 for my use. Currently we share disk1 but we are running low on space.

Must I power off and reboot each time or can I put the laptop in standby or hibernation mode on disk1, swap over to disk2 and then, when I put disk1 back in, resume from standby or hibernation rather than rebooting from scratch?

The reason for this is that I sometimes play lengthy backgammon matches against the computer that can’t be saved. If I put disk1 in standby I can resume the game but if I power off and reboot, the game is lost.

It would be nice to be able to put disk1 in standby with an unfinished match that I can then resume when my wife has finished with her work on disk2.

As far as I know, in standby mode everything is written to disk and the memory etc is all switched off so I don’t see why it won’t work.

I suppose I could just try it and see if it works but I didn’t want to screw anything up.

Thanks

fwor

Standby probably won't work - it keeps your current machine state in RAM, which is just refreshed on low power. Though I confess I've never tried it, I wouldn't recommend removing a HDD while standby power is on.

Hibernation should work - the machine state is stored on the HDD, and should resume when that drive is next powered up.

Avoriaz

Thanks fwor. That makes sense.

I will try swapping the disks in hibernation mode and see what happens.

John_Gray

I'd be tempted to suggest that you should swap disks only when the machine is powered off. You may run the risk of corrupting your disks otherwise. In both standby and hibernate the operating system 'assumes' that it finds the same hardware peripherals when it wakes up as when it went to sleep.

Alternatively, do these disks use a USB connection? If so, you might be able to get away with interchanging disks when the machine is active, by clicking on the icon at the bottom right of the screen, the one with the left-pointing green arrow above a grey rectangle.

fwor

John_Gray wrote: »

I'd be tempted to suggest that you should swap disks only when the machine is powered off. You may run the risk of corrupting your disks otherwise. In both standby and hibernate the operating system 'assumes' that it finds the same hardware peripherals when it wakes up as when it went to sleep.

Agreed with respect to standby, but you ~should~ be ok with hibernation, as the system should save the contents of RAM (and probably a whole lot of other info) to hiberfile.sys and then shut everything down - there should be no power on, and no files left open to corrupt.

Possibly a better solution would be to put the wife's HDD in a USB caddy, and set the PC to boot from USB before internal HDD. That way, if her drive is plugged in it will boot from that and if not it will boot from yours and restore your pre-hibernation state.

Unfortunately, many laptops don't seem to have a "boot from USB" option in the BIOS, though.