Windows 7 - Hot swapping IDE HDDs trouble.

I have an IDE drive set up, like, its a drive, or tray, that I slide out and pop in a IDE HDD and put in, and reboot my PC, do whatever on it, then reboot, pop another one in, etc. Well, I dont want to reboot, and found out that it apparently is possible to hot swap them, without reboot. I have an internal SATA drive, its my main HDD, but for some reason its on a slave position, or a secondary master. There's only one IDE port. What configuration would I have to have my HDD (SATA) in, to be able to hot swap my IDE HDD, and what would I have to do, settings-wise, maybe software? Thanks alot, ANY help is greatly appreciated

The simple facts about ide drives mixed on the same system as you have sata drives will see the sata drive bumped in line to being seen as a secondary by Windows. ide overrides sata by default.

If you have an ide drive present when going to install Windows for example the Windows installer will see and place the boot files and information on the ide drive even while you select the installation to go onto the sata. You have to unplug the ide drive first in order to see the sata made bootable will all files placed there.

Flash drives, pen/thumb drives are the other hand are seen as removable and are readily how swappable while booted in Windows there without role shifting for the sata drive. But they still lack the capacity seen with many larger ide HDs.

Unfortunately there are no settings other then changing the drive mode in the bios for a sata to prevent the role change seen when adding on an ide model.