thotswap - change the device in the SelectBay of a Toshiba laptop without rebooting

thotswap [ -qwzurhv ]

thotswap is a small daemon that monitors whether the SelectBay on a Toshiba is locked. When the SelectBay is unlocked it attempts to remove the device from the IDE bus. On locking the SelectBay the IDE bus is rescanned for IDE/ATAPI devices. This enables SelectBay devices to changed without the need for a reboot.

For some older models that do no support hot-swapping, the SelectBay device can still be changed using warm-swapping. First use the command line to unregister the device. Then suspend the laptop and place the new device into the SelectBay. On resuming use the command line to rescan the IDE bus for new devices.

-q, --quite

Operate in silent mode without the beeps.

-w, --wall

Send messages to the user using wall(1).

-x, --xmessage

Send messages to the user using xmessage(1x).

-u, --unregister

Try an unregister a device from the IDE bus without going into daemon mode.

-r, --rescan

Rescan the IDE bus for new devices without going into daemon mode.

-h, --help

Display a short help message and exit.

-v, --version

Print the version number and exit.

When a none IDE/ATAPI device is inserted you will see error messages saying "WARNING: error rescanning the IDE bus". This just means that no IDE/ATAPI device could be found and can be safely ignored.

This program was written by Jonathan Buzzard (jonathan@buzzard.org.uk) and may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this program.

svpw(1), hotkey(1x), tpasswd(1), alarm(1), wmtuxtime(1x)