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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!qns3.qns.com!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!zrz.TU-Berlin.DE!cs.tu-berlin.de!uni-erlangen.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news 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 Lines: 30 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) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 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. ;-)