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Re: Media Bay



On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 04:10:41PM +0300, Jerome BENOIT wrote:
> Hello All !
> 
> is there a way to manage the media bay ?
> I would like to move in/out my ZiP iomega drive and my CDDrive
> in the fly (Currently I reboot my laptop, and I do not like it !).

On my Dell I4000, I use the media bay for swapping between a CD-Rom
drive and a floppy drive. 

Note: If your CDDrive and Zip drive are both IDE devices, will they both
      be /dev/hdc? If so, then you probably want to look into the hdparm
      package and registering/unregistering IDE interfaces on the fly.
      Be sure to read the warnings in the hdparm doc first though.

Here's what works for me:

- If booting *without* the cdrom inserted, the kernel will not see it.
  And it will refuse to see it until coerced by hdparm
  (/usr/share/doc/hdparm/examples/idectl). I boot very rarely (thanks to
  the sleepd package), so I have to look it up every time...

- My kernel has floppy, ide-cd and cdrom as modules. I'm not sure it
  matters for this; but I always had them as modules...

- Before removing the CDRom drive:
    # umount /cdrom
    # rmmod ide-cd cdrom

  In the past, I have gotten away without rmmod'ing the relevant
  modules, but sometimes the machine would end up going *very* slow
  while the kernel spent some 50% of the cpu time looking for things I
  removed from the bay.. Lesson learned: rmmod first or suffer.

- Before removing the floppy drive:
    # umount /floppy
    # rmmod floppy

voila!

HTH, YMMV
-- 
Karl E. Jørgensen
karl@jorgensen.com
www.karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
<dark> eat Depends: cook | eat-out.
       But eat-out is non-free so that's out.
       And cook Recommends: clean-pans.
	-- Seen on #Debian

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