Mail Archives: opendos/1997/02/11/12:40:24
On Tue, 11 Feb 1997 mharris AT blackwidow DOT saultc DOT on DOT ca wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Feb 1997, Colin W. Glenn wrote:
>
> > > > the drive, the system would prompt you to insert the volume if you
> > > How can you "mount" something that is not there? That is a
> > 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
>
> Your definition of "mount" seems to be faulty. To "mount" a
My apologies, I looking for a term which hasn't been declared yet, how
about we call it INTEND?
> 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.
An application which uses INT 21h 44h 0Dh 60h and the drive is properly
constructed to utilize command code 1 will cause a fault and should
generate an error when you change disks. Do this, start a batch file on a
floppy with a pause statement in it, when you hit the pause, change disks
and see what command.com does. If command.com was doing raw reads, it
should crash, but it doesn't because it checks to see it the disk id's as
the one it was using to begin with.
> Also, AFAIK ext2 disks don't have a volume label. I could be
> wrong however as I'm not that deeply knowledgable on the
As far as I know, _any_ disk reserves the first sector for the media
information, if not a volume label, then a serial number.
> filesystem at that level. I damned well would like to see
> automounting of ALL removeable media in both DOS, AND Linux
I'd love to be able to access a tape drive as a disk, do a DIR and you get
the volumes, chdir to a volume, dir, and you get the dir's, keep chdir'ing
until you see the file you want, then copy it out of the tape drive to
_whereever_ you want the file to reside. The reason I use a tape drive is
because I packed a _huge_ directory tree containing my ZIP's, and now I
have to go through two steps to retrieve a file.
(1) read the tape drive and locate the file I want.
(2) extract and redirect the file BY PATH/NAME to where I want it to go.
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