Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwm.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!bu.edu!purdue!haven!mimsy!mojo!russotto
From: russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Determining if a drive is a hard drive
Message-ID: <1990Oct6.194429.24105@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 6 Oct 90 19:44:29 GMT
References: <20945@well.sf.ca.us> <1990Oct4.205555.3700@eng.umd.edu> <21041@well.sf.ca.us>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The News System)
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
Lines: 42

In article <21041@well.sf.ca.us> gurgle@well.sf.ca.us (Pete Gontier) writes:
>In article <1990Oct4.205555.3700@eng.umd.edu> russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto) writes:
>>In article <20945@well.sf.ca.us> gurgle@well.sf.ca.us (Pete Gontier) writes:
>>>In article <1219@beguine.UUCP> Eliot.Henry@samba.acs.unc.edu writes:
>
>>>> I need to figure out how to create a list of all hard drives
>>>>(BOTH SCSI and nonSCSI)
>>>
>>Hmm.. it isn't actually that hard-- why not walk the drive queue looking
>>for nonejectable, writeable drives?
>>(Call drivestatus to see if the drive is writeable-- this will exclude CDs,
>>and hardware-locked hard drives)
>
>Well, the problem with this method is that as soon as you have Syquest
>volumes lying around, your test fails, because they're ejectable.

OK.  Define 'hard drive'.  Is a floppy a hard drive (guess not).  A Bernoulli
(welll....?)  How about a Syquest?  Or a Quantum Q250 (Obviously)

>The sad part is that even my test fails to gather info regarding these drives.
>It turns out that as we used the method of getting the volume's driver name,
>it became apparent that third parties found it necessary to name their SCSI
>drivers something other than ".SCSI00" and third-party CD-ROM makers found
>it necessary to do something similar. Why this happened, I don't know. Maybe
>Apple told them not to use the name. I suspect, though, that it was ego.
>
>This is a sticky problem; I think Apple's paradigm of device-independence
>breaks down in some places. Or is enforced too enthusiastically.

What exactly is it you need to know?

>>(you won't get any remote volumes, but you can't find out what they are
>>anyway)
>
>Sure you can; do it by running the VCB queue and querying driver names
>as I explained.

But all you can find out is that it IS a remote volume, not whether it is
a floppy, hard drive, write only memory, etc...
--
Matthew T. Russotto	russotto@eng.umd.edu	russotto@wam.umd.edu
      .sig under construction, like the rest of this campus.