Re: PCMCIA cards in laptops: do they need to be mounted/unmounted when installed/removed?
Ken Heard wrote:
> 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.
Right.
> 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.
Right.
> 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.
I would doublecheck the fstab(5) manpage to make sure you don't try to
automount any filesystem that you don't intend to have connected each and
every time the machine boots.
http://ursine.ca/cgi-bin/dwww?type=runman&location=fstab/5
> It is interesting that the adapter manufacturer is identified as
> Hitachi; whereas the adapter is labelled Sandisk.
That's actually not that unusual. Much (most?) hardware is manufactured by
one company, but distributed, labelled and sold as another brand.
> 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.
Scripts that are automatically called when a device is inserted or ejected.
Just because it acts like magic doesn't mean it is. :o)
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