[solved] Hot Swap hard drive

[noobmeister]

Hello Everyone,

I was running a previous version of VB (5.x.xx not sure exactly which version). I upgraded to 5.1.16 last week; and now I have lost the ability to add a hard drive to my live Linux Guest. Any idea why this is?


Thanks!

[noobmeister]

This was my own error.

I did not realize that the hard drive ports were limited to 2. And, I had a RAID CentOS guest running with two hard drives. After removing one of the hard drives, I was able to see the add(+) button become available again.

[socratis]

Just a clarification. With older VirtualBox versions the "Port Count" for the SATA controller were statically assigned at 20(?), 30(?), I don't remember exactly. Now they're "dynamic", as in it will adjust itself to the number of disks that you have available. So I think that you could simply add another disk and the PortCount would adjust itself to 3. And so on...

[mpack]

That's assuming he's using SATA of course. IDE is rather more restricted on drive count, and certainly doesn't allow hot swapping.

[noobmeister]

socratis: Yes you are correct. The port count was adjusted to my number of disks; after increasing this I was able to see the add (+) button again. Without the need to remove a disk first.

mpack: yes, I was using SATA.

[foo_]

Command for removing a HD while the machine is running:

Code: Select all

vboxmanage storageattach "NAME OF THE VM" --storagectl "SATA" --port 1 --device 1 --medium none

Command for adding a HD while the machine is running:

Code: Select all

vboxmanage storageattach "NAME OF YOUR VM" --storagectl "SATA" --port 1 --device 0 --type hdd --medium "/DIR TO YOUR VDI/NAME OF YOUR VDI.vdi" (or UUID instead of filename)

Note, only guest SATA controllers supports hot plug/swap

[socratis]

now I have lost the ability to add a hard drive

Command for removing a HD

foo_,
I'm not quite sure why you felt the need to comment to a 1-year old thread, that was already marked as [Solved] by the OP, with something that is the opposite of what the OP was asking for...

[foo_]

Was searching for the vboxmanage commands to hot swap HDs on VMs and this is one of the first results that comes up in Google.