Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 27 Nov 2001 18:47:03 +0100 | From | Paul Bristow <> | Subject | Re: ide-floppy.c vs devfs |
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Borsenkow Andrej wrote:
>>This is made somewhat more complicated by the fact that ide-floppy >> > disks > >>can use either the whole disk, with no partition table or, more >>commonly, partition4. So a user-friendly solution would be to create >> > a > >>floppy node that pointed to the partition, if it existed, or the whole >>disk if it didn't. With appropriate code to handle that fact that >>anyone can partition these disks in any way they like. >> >> > > Where's the problem? Use .../disc for whole disc or .../part4 for > "normal" access. (Or /dev/hdc and /dev/hdc4 if you prefer) It is nice if > partition code can detect it but it is not ide-floppy driver problem.
Just wondering if we should be clever for the users here. Maybe I should leave that to user-space tools? Or is there anything in devfs that can take care of this? The nice solution for end-users might be a /dev/idefloppy that is a symlink to the relevant node in the /dev/ide... tree.
>>Note this doesn't take account of the nice ATAPI command that sets the >>disk into "ignore track 0" mode, making a partition 4 look like an >>entire floppy with 1 less track. >> >> > > Why complicate things more than needed?
Because you can boot from a zip or ls-120 drive, with the BIOS setting it to this mode. There are disks out there that are unreadable unless you ignore track zero, by formatting them in a PC like this.
>>Anyone up to telling me how this is handled in the SCSI layer? >> >> > > When I boot without media in Jaz drive I get something like "no media > inserted, assuming 1GB 512B per sector". Actually I modeled my patch > from this - use some default values reported by drive when no media > currently exists.
OK. This makes the most sense here. I'm happy to go with this.
I'll dig out your patch - discovered I was on holiday when you originally submitted it - and code and test something over the next day or so. Thanks for the help
> -andrej
--
Paul
Email: paul@paulbristow.net Web: http://paulbristow.net ICQ: 11965223
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