On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 06:40:29PM -0700, plug bert wrote:
> Hi All!
> 
>    Is there any way of detecting if mounted removable
> storage -- floppy, zip, card, whatever -- has been
> physically removed from the drive?

In general, no.  The fact that floppy disks may be so easily, and
manually ejected is a source of serious trouble.  Other non-PC machines
I've used that have floppy disks (Sun and Macintosh in particular) have
a command that will explicitly eject a disk.  You need a pin or some
other thin pointed object to manually eject a disk in the uncommon
incidence when it gets stuck.

For Zip drives the situation is a little easier.  Linux will override the
drive and prevent it from ejecting the medium until it has been properly
unmounted, as Windows does.  Again, there's a pinhole on Zip drives that
will allow one to manually eject a disk if for some reason the normal
soft ejection scheme fails to work.  So it is for all practical purposes
impossible to remove a mounted Zip disk under normal circumstances.

I'm not sure what cards you're talking about, though I imagine they're
USB or PCMCIA flash memory devices that one plugs in.  They suffer from
the same problems as floppy disks and there is no way to detect that
you might have caused irreparable damage to the file system on the
medium by forcibly ejecting it.

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