*BSD News Article 66422


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Automatic mounting of CD and disk???
Date: 17 Apr 1996 22:18:05 GMT
Organization: Private FreeBSD site, Dresden
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Message-ID: <4l3qmt$6dq@uriah.heep.sax.de>
References: <31739A36.41C67EA6@ima.mdh.se> <DpzF9u.J63@nemesis.lonestar.org>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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uhclem@nemesis.lonestar.org (Frank Durda IV) writes:

>[0]Could this also be done whith the floppy disk?
>
>Same issues/problems as above except now you can leave yourself with a
>completely corrupted filesystem ...

Even worse.  My perhaps most favorite misdesign of the IBM PeeCee hits
again here: some stupid IBM engineer dropped the READY line from the
floppy bus (apparently since they felt that a nifty you-can-simply-
tweak-some-wires-to-support-just-two-drives feature was more
important), and hard-wired the READY pin of the floppy controller to
+5 Vdc.  So now, we're stuck with a braindead floppy controller chip,
embedded into an even more braindead floppy controller card design,
where your only chance to find out about the ready state of your
floppy drive is to turn it on, issue a command that would operate on a
floppy, and time out the command after some unreasonable time,
declaring the drive as ``not ready'' if the timeout hit.

(There's another misfeature in the floppy controller board design, and
cabling, it's that the controller itself were able to seek on both
floppies in parallel, but you can only turn on one drive at a time, so
this cannot be used.)

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)