Mail Archives: opendos/1997/02/11/06:36:17
On Mon, 10 Feb 1997, Colin W. Glenn wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Feb 1997 mharris AT blackwidow DOT saultc DOT on DOT ca wrote:
> > On Wed, 5 Feb 1997, Colin W. Glenn wrote:
> > > > Yep, I think it should be possible to mount BOTH ways from the
>
> > > the drive, the system would prompt you to insert the volume if you
> > > accessed it and it wasn't in the drive.
> >
> > How can you "mount" something that is not there? That is a
> > contradiction of terms. You mount a disk, use it, then umount
> > it and then remove it. If you remove a disk without umounting,
> > kiss the disk goodbye and get your fingers on the BRS.
>
> As I said, you could 'mount', ie declare the diskname as something you
> would like to use later on, the driver should be smart enough to see that
> the volume isn't really there and ignore it UNTIL you attempt to access
> it, then it generates the error. Should you remove the media before
> switching to another 'mounted' disk, the driver sees that the media has
> changed and prompts you to insert the prior disk if it needs to be updated
> before switching to the one you want to use. I know this sounds ungainly,
> but DOS does this with floppies already.
Your definition of "mount" seems to be faulty. To "mount" a
filesystem is to give it a place in the filesystem where programs
can use it immediately. If you remove the media, then by
definition, the drive/disk is NOT mounted anymore. If you
haven't unmounted it, then be prepared for errors. As long as
write caching isn't enabled on removeable media drives, or the
drives are read-only, then it would be possible (and damned
useful) for DOS to automount disks from any filesystem type
automatically. This however would require the kernel to have
some sort of logistics to determine what filesystem is on each
disk. I'm not entirely sure if it is possible to detect FS's
like this although I suspect it may be for most FS's. At any
rate, if you manually mount a disk in a drive, and then pop it
out, you will cause problems. Trust me, I've toasted enough
floppies with this hard fact.
Also, AFAIK ext2 disks don't have a volume label. I could be
wrong however as I'm not that deeply knowledgable on the
filesystem at that level. I damned well would like to see
automounting of ALL removeable media in both DOS, AND Linux
though.
Mike A. Harris | http://blackwidow.saultc.on.ca/~mharris
Computer Consultant | My webpage has moved and my address has changed.
My dynamic address: http://blackwidow.saultc.on.ca/~mharris/ip-address.html
mailto:mharris AT blackwidow DOT saultc DOT on DOT ca
LINUX: The ONLY bulletproof 32-bit operating system that has it all.
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