Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!bionet!agate!shelby!helens!relgyro!mike
From: mike@relgyro.stanford.edu (Mike Macgirvin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: How can I poll a drive?
Message-ID: <331@helens.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 12 Sep 89 23:16:10 GMT
References: <342@castle.ed.ac.uk> <45855611.15768@bladder.UUCP>
Sender: news@helens.STANFORD.EDU
Reply-To: mike@relgyro.STANFORD.EDU (Mike Macgirvin)
Organization: Stanford Relativity Gyro Experiment (GP-B)
Lines: 30

In article <45855611.15768@bladder.UUCP> wagnere@bladder.UUCP (Eric Wagner) writes:
>In article <342@castle.ed.ac.uk>, erck12@castle.ed.ac.uk (Gnome) writes:
>> 	Here is one for the hackers among you! I want to poll a given (i.e.
>> not necasarily physical) drive, given a drive letter supplied by the user. I
>> want to find out if it is present, and functional without generating any DOS
>> "retry, abort or ..." or "insert diskette for drive X" type messages. I am
>> working in MSC 5.1. How would I go about it?
>
>Also, how would one go about detecting when the drive door has been
>closed, like FASTBAK does?
>
      Take a look at the _harderr() and _hardresume() functions. They will
do what you ask. The only problem I had with them was figuring out the
specific error from the error codes. I ended up running a dummy program,
and created the hard errors that *I* wanted to catch, while printing out
the error numbers. Any other errors should be left to DOS. (i.e. you
probably don't want to leave your prgram running with a major keyboard
failure...).



/*+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+        I only speak for myself, and MY brain has been turned to MUSH!     +
+  Mike Macgirvin                                                           +
+  - Systems Administrator  Stanford Relativity Gyroscope Experiment (GP-B) +
+  - Internet:              mike@relgyro.stanford.edu (36.64.0.50)          +
+  - Bitnet:                mike%relgyro.stanford.edu@stanford              +
+  - Uucp:                  uunet!relgyro.stanford.edu!mike                 +
+  "'Scuse me, while I kiss the sky" - Robert James Marshall (Jimi) Hendrix +
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++*/