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From: golden@frith.uucp (James S Golden)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amax II partition
Message-ID: <1990Oct11.025703.22462@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu>
Date: 11 Oct 90 02:57:03 GMT
References: <9010091338.AA23337@terra.oscs.montana.edu> <8925@helios.TAMU.EDU> <14491@brahms.udel.edu> <47253@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
Sender: news@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu
Organization: Michigan State University, College of Engineering
Lines: 46

Here's my two cents worth on mounting a device without having an icon show
on the Workbench:

  1)  Automount merely means that the driver for the device is loaded 
      when the device is mounted, instead of waiting until the device
      is first accessed.

  2)  Mounting a non-Automount device merely interprets the mountlist
      and places the appropriate information in an "available devices
      list" for later reference should the device be accessed.  This
      way the drivers are loaded later and memory is saved should the
      device never be accessed.

  3)  "LoadWB" loads the Workbench environment and all the disk.info's
      (disk icon files) for filesystem devices.  If a device is non-
      Automount and it is mounted before the LoadWB command, then no
      icon will show.  (Since the device driver isn't loaded yet the
      system treats the device like a floppy disk that's not in the 
      drive [just an analogy... no flames, please!])  The device is 
      non-Automount, meaning that the driver isn't loaded until the
      first *AMIGA-DOS* access of the device.  This explains why 
      Amax couldn't use the partition <- it's driver was never loaded
      even though it's spec's were mounted. 

      If a device has an Automount mountlist entry and it is mounted 
      before the LoadWB command, then an icon will show and the 
      device will be immediately available since the driver was pre-
      loaded.

      Now for the point:

      If a device has an Automount mountlist entry and it is mounted
      *AFTER* the LoadWB command, the an icon will NOT show and the
      device will be immediately available since the driver was pre-
      loaded.  The icon doesn't show since LoadWB has already loaded
      all the disk.info's and since a hard-drive partition is non-
      removable, Workbench doesn't check for diskchanges which would
      prompt it to load a new disk.info ... 

		 Of course then there's WB2.0 ..... ?

			     - Mike Golden
			       Electrical Engineering
			       Michigan State Univ.

What, no 1K .sig?