Linux-kernel mailing list archive 1998-49,: Re: Can this CD/Floppy Behaviour be Done? [offtopic?]

# Re: Can this CD/Floppy Behaviour be Done? [offtopic?]

Raul Miller (rdm@test.legislate.com)
Tue, 8 Dec 1998 16:30:30 -0500

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Dennis Grant <dg50@daimlerchrysler.com> wrote:
> > One of the behaviours I really miss from my Amiga days is the ability to
> > auto-detect and auto-mount removeable media filesystems.

H. Peter Anvin <hpa@transmeta.com> wrote:
> This is very hard (read: highly unsafe) to do on the PC, because the
> hardware doesn't give a signal to the OS that something has been
> inserted, and even worse -- that something is about to be removed.
> Even IDE CD-ROMs with a soft button and motorized mechanisms, which
> *should* be able to do this, don't give the software the neccessary
> clues that something has been inserted, or that someone pressed the
> button.

I don't think the amiga did either. One of the annoying things about
the amiga was if you left the drive empty it would poll the empty
drive to see if you'd stuck another disk in yet.

What the amiga did have was a user interface which was guaranteed to
be present in the context where the person would be removing the disk.
That, and a low level driver which read and wrote a track at at time.
That, and it put a random number on each disk as an identifier (woe to
the person who had two different disks with the same id).

If you ejected a disk before it was done with it, it would put up a
request that you put the disk back in. You *could* go on and do
other stuff, to some degree (though those requests were rather insistent
if I recall correctly). And when you put the original disk back in
it would then write out whatever was pending.

    --
    Raul

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