On 9/1/2000 Brian May wrote:
[1] Dos/windows copes with this problem in a different (IMHO broken) way - it keeps track of which disk is inserted, and if it needs to read/write to another disk, it complains to the user to reinsert the original disk. Why is this mechanism broken? For starters: some games will automatically eject a CD-ROM and ask you to insert the next CD-ROM. For some reason, windows will often decide that it still needed the original CD-ROM, and ask you to reinsert it!!! It even goes as far as to suggest that the CD-ROM might be dirty. Now thats what I call "machine is smarter"!!!
I never noticed that back when i briefly tinkered with win95, one thing I find interesting is windoze does NOT lock the cd drawer closed when a CD is in use like GNU/Linux and MacOS do, for example i insert a CD and run some program on it under win95 then press the eject button and it spits out the CD and windoze blue screened shortly thereafter.
I have never seen windoze ask for a device back again, i didn't know it had such a function win* does not appear to really have a concept of `mounted' filesystems as far as i could tell.
MacOS on the other hand has what you describe, extremely annoying at that. (it halts the entire OS when it decides it must have a disk back)
Ethan