I think the answer here is technically a yes. Based on Floppy drive technology (at least for the PC), there is a I/O port where you can go look if the disk has been changed. It is simply a mechanical switch which detects the presence or absence of a disk. My recollection of DOS tells me that this switch was used by this archaic operating system.
On Fri, 28 May 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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. > > -- > Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) > Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph > Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph > . > To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug > . > Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to > http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie > -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
