Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!sun!imagen!atari!apratt
From: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: 40 folders & regexp
Message-ID: <978@atari.UUCP>
Date: 16 Feb 88 22:23:37 GMT
References: <332@stag.UUCP>
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 24

in article <332@stag.UUCP>, syntel!dal@stag.UUCP (Dale Schumacher) says:
> Would it be possible to fake a media change for a hard drive?  If so, a
> small TSR could be written that would sit on the V-blank or 200Hz timer
> and cause media changes every once in a while.  I imagine a media change
> on the hard disk wouldn't get in the way much, since it should be fairly
> quick to reload.  Do you see any problems with this idea?

Yes: a huge one.  When you get media change on a drive, all open files
on that drive are closed & forgotten.  No data is flushed, no warnings
are issued... You just get kicked out in the street.  Not a fun thing
to have happen at Vblank time.

Having a program which causes media change is another matter.  In fact
I have one, and use it when I pop a floppy, modify that floppy on another
machine, and re-insert it in the original.  (Without such a program,
the state would go from not-changed to (pop disk) maybe-changed to
(re-insert, check serial number) not-changed.

But it requires user intervention, and the better solution is just
to fix the damn bug in the first place.

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt