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

[Ken Heard <ken@heard.name>]

Thanks everyone for the replies.  If I understand them correctly, the
situation is as follows:

PCMCIA cards can be hot plugged and hot unplugged just like for instance
USB devices.

However, also like USB devices, if the PCMCIA card is or contains a
mobile storage device, to gain access to the storage on the device it
has to be mounted.  Likewise, before such a PCMCIA card, like USB
storage devices, is removed, it should be unmounted in the same manner.

As it happens, I still have a PCMCIA adapter for CF cards, which is what 
was used to connect CF cards to laptops before the days of USB ports on 
laptops.  So I put a CF card in it and inserted it into a PCMCIA slot. 
  "pcccardctl ident" returned:

	product info: "HITACHI", "FLASH", "5.0", ""
  	manfid: 0x0007, 0x0000
  	function: 4 (fixed disk)

Dmesg however told me much more.  It produced the following:

	Probing IDE interface ide2...
	hde: Hitachi XX.V.3.4.0.0, CFA DISK drive
	ide2 at 0x100-0x107,0x10e on irq 10
	hde: max request size: 128KiB
	hde: 2002896 sectors (1025 MB) w/1KiB Cache, CHS=1987/16/63
 	hde: hde1
	ide-cs: hde: Vpp = 0.0

Sure enough, I found a directory called /dev/hde1.  By creating 
directory /media/pccfcard and running "mount -t vfat /dev/hde1 
/media/pccfcard" I had complete access to the cf card.  I then added an 
appropriate line to /etc/fstab, which I will test after the next time I 
boot my laptop.

It is interesting that the adapter manufacturer is identified as 
Hitachi; whereas the adapter is labelled Sandisk.

I also noticed that pccardctl includes the commands insert and eject. 
Since the cards can be hot inserted and removed, I wonder why have these 
two commands.

			Regards,

			Ken Heard
			Toronto, Canada