Re: PCMCIA cards in laptops: do they need to be mounted/unmounted when installed/removed?

[cga2000 <cga2000@optonline.net>]

On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 01:40:30PM EST, Ken Heard wrote:
> PCMCIA cards in laptops: do they need to be mounted/unmounted when
> installed/removed like floppies, CF cards, etc.?

mount/umount are file system management commands.

see "man 8 mount" .. in particular the "NAME" part and the first few
lines of "DESCRIPTION".

NAME

      mount - mount a file system

...      

as to PC cards they are managed by the cardctl or pccardctl commands
(depending on how recent your kernel is).

see "man cardctl" or "man pccardctl" depending on how recent your
kernel is.

I happen to have a portable CD-ROM burner attached to my laptop via a PC
card.  

If in need to check the current status of that PC card (in slot) 1 I
could issue a:

# pccardctl status 1
  5V 16-bit PC Card
  function 0: [ready]

Now, after inserting a data CD in this peripheral in order to access its
contents I would have to mount the file system:

# mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrw0 /mnt/cdrw0

I can then "cd" - no pun intended - to /mnt/cdrw0 and apart from the
fact that the files are necessarily read-only.. I can pretty much
process its contents as I would my home directory.

IOW, it is as if I had plugged the iso file system that lives on the
CD-ROM into an available slot of my running file system, thereby giving
myself and other users of the system access to its contents.

If on the other hand I had inserted an audio CD in the peripheral I
would not need to issue a mount command to listen to it.  And if I did
try to mount issue a mount command against the audio CD, I would get an
error informing me that the medium does not contain a file system.

To try and clarify further, I also have a PC network card in the other
pcmcia slot  of this laptop and clearly there would be no sense in
trying to "mount" that card.

HTH

Thanks,
cga