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From: ridder@elvira.enet.dec.com (Hans Ridder)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Determining disk devices
Message-ID: <572@shodha.dec.com>
Date: 8 Jan 90 20:50:18 GMT
References: <2924@dogie.macc.wisc.edu>
Sender: news@shodha.dec.com
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Customer Support Center
Lines: 39

In article <2924@dogie.macc.wisc.edu> gilmore@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Neil Gilmore) writes:
>In article <570@shodha.dec.com>, ridder@elvira.enet.dec.com (Hans Ridder) writes...
>>What is the purpose of putting up a button when there is no disk in
>>the drive?  There's nothing to read from or write to....
>
>What is the purpose of putting up a volume buttin when that disk isn't 
>in the drive. There's nothing to read from or write to....

I didn't say you should or shouldn't put up volume buttons for volumes
not in any drives, did I?  On a technical level, you have two options.
The first is to put up a button for every volume entry in DOS's list.
The second is to put put up a button only for volumes currently
mounted (in a drive).  Either is do-able.  I would probably choose the
first option.  What's the point of your question?

>A good idea, but there must be a way to access floppy volumes not 
>currently known by the system. The drive buttons are quite useful for 
>floppys, less so for hard disks and networks, which tend to be always 
>mounted and have potenrially several volume names per physical device.

As others have pointed out, using Intuition (or the input.device) it
is quite possible to determine when floppies are inserted into drives,
and thus they would be mounted and visible to any file requester.
With this method you can easily write to any disk you want to stick
into a drive (floppy, CD ROM, cartridge disk, whatever they think of
next.)

Something I thought of a while back was that a file requester could
*automatically* select a volume when it was inserted.  The assumption
would be that if you just stuck it in, you probably want to access it.
I havn't seen any applications doing this, so I don't know if this
would be more annoying than not.  I'd have to try living with it for a
while to see if it drove me bats.  Just an idea....

-hans
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  Hans-Gabriel Ridder			Digital Equipment Corporation
  ridder@elvira.enet.dec.com		Customer Support Center
  ...decwrl!elvira.enet!ridder		Colorado Springs, CO