Ultrabay Slim accessories hot-swappable?

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sojourner · #1 Post by **sojourner** » Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:53 pm

I have various accessories for this T41 Ultrabay Slim (e.g. HDD caddy, DVD-RAM). Are these items hot-swappable or does the laptop have to be shut-down before ejecting the accessory from the bay?

#2 Post by **richk** » Fri Nov 30, 2007 9:01 pm

They are hot-swappable

sjh953 · #3 Post by **sjh953** » Fri Nov 30, 2007 10:13 pm

I could be wrong, or I could be misdiagnosing my symptom -- but I've come to the conclusion that simply swapping Ultrabay devices causes problems.

You don't have to shut the computer down, but you shouldn't just push the button and pull the dvd/battery out.

When I first got my T42p, I assumed I could just pull out, say, the DVD drive and swap in the Ultrabay slim battery. I made these kind of swaps quite a few times.

At the same time, I was having continual ACPIEC errors. The computer would freeze, the cursor would freeze. All I could do was a hard restart. It was a giant pain. These fatal ACPIEC errors always showed up in Event Viewer.

I was just about to send the unit back to IBM for the motherboard replacement they recommended, when I did some investigating and found that to remove things from the Ultrabay, I should be using Fn + F9 to trigger EasyEject. This 'officially' notifies the computer to "stop" the battery, dvd, or whatever.

Only then should the swap be made.

To make a long story short, once I started using EasyEject, the number of crashes went down -- then stopped. I haven't had a crash for several weeks now.

It's almost as if some sort of preference files were corrupted by not using EasyEject. Over time, those files were resaved correctly and the problem disappeared.

So, my vote goes for being careful about how you remove things from the Ultrabay.

#4 Post by **richk** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 11:47 am

I don't know about batteries, but I swap my optical drive and 2nd HDD adapter all the time

#5 Post by **carbon_unit** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 2:30 pm

I never have any trouble hot swapping things in the ultrabay. As long as Easy Eject is installed it shoud detect when you release the eject lever and safely disconnect the device. If you don't have Easy Eject installed you can click on the green arrow in the systray and "Safely Remove" the device, then eject it with the lever.

rhema83 · #6 Post by **rhema83** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 3:17 pm

Ditto from my experience. As long as you "safely eject" and see that the green LED at the ultrabay has turned off, you can eject the device.

Ultrabay Slim accessories hot-swappable?

Ultrabay Slim accessories hot-swappable?

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