How should i use HotPlug on my 970 Extreme4?

[Jin-Roh]

Hey All

Ive recently gone from a gigabyte board to an asrock 970 extreme4

on the gigabyte i was able to use esata hotplug simply by clicking the safely remove feature in the system tray the same as a USB drive would

With this asock board no such icon appears so and i cant figure out how to safely remove one HDD and plug in another...
Any drive i plug in while im in windows seems to powerup but never shows up in windows unless its already plugged in when i boot up
I have about 4 drives i like to swap between at any given time so shutting down to swap drives is dam annoying!!!
I have set the AHCI setting in the BIOS and then a refresh install on windows 7
What am i missing?


i just saw this thread http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/4...g-problem.html
obviously i have a different board but it sounds like the same problem....
Though i have already updated to the latest bios i found on the website...

[Jin-Roh]

Re: How should i use HotPlug on my 970 Extreme4?

Nobody has any ideas? 209 views and no reply

[electric bill]

Re: How should i use HotPlug on my 970 Extreme4?

I installed a program called HotSwap! on my 970 Extreme3 that places a red icon on the taskbar, similar to the green Safely Remove Hardware one that Windows uses. For a few months I used the red icon to unmount a drive but one day I noticed that the green Windows icon also worked.
I use a SATA docking Station for backups so it's important for me to be able to mount and unmount hds.

Bill

[Jin-Roh]

Re: How should i use HotPlug on my 970 Extreme4?

yeah my previous board a gigabyte i could just click the remove safely icon just like you would with a usb drive but with this asrock board that icon never appears :(
This mean i have to shutdown to swap drives!
I will try that program you mentioned! I hope it works for me too....thanks for your reply

[Jin-Roh]

Re: How should i use HotPlug on my 970 Extreme4?

so i tried the Hotswap! program....sure i can remove the drive but then i plug in another drive and it spins up but never shows up in windows....

is this a windows thing ? cause i can plug in usb drives and they show up but through esata it doesnt, and it used to be great with the gigabyte board so it must have something to do with the control asrock uses for the esata on this board....

Is the any update that can be done to fix this?

ive already updated to the latest bios.....

[Jin-Roh]

Re: How should i use HotPlug on my 970 Extreme4?

just got a tip from a toms hardware thread which works
i use device manager and right click on the disk drives a select scan for hardware changes and bingo the drive appears!
not ideal but beats rebooting the system