mike scott wrote:
Please explain how this software can possibly work. If you connect a
portable hard drive nothing runs if you don't want it to. How can the
drive "resist formatting"?
Courtesy of windows 'autorun' misfeature, which too many people will
assume is a Good Thing, necessary, vital and irremoveable rather than
the more truthful converse.
I don't understand how a Windows autorun would affect Linux systems.
I suppose a /really/ perverse manufacturer could gimmick the device
controller and enforce a fixed partitioning system; I can't imagine
any would think it worth the effort; (although thinking back, I
recall we once had a 70Mb winchester that pretended to be 3 and a
half 20Mb drives back in PDP11/VAX days, emulating smaller DEC
drives).
I came across something similar with a Fujitsu hard drive (80M IIRC)
used on a Data General Elipse. However, I suspect that was simply due
to a cylinder/head count mismatch, rather than deliberate action. Back
in those days, programmers often specified head & track, rather than
letting the OS worry about such things. As an example, on one system we
had, using 200 MB disk packs, the drives were simply used to capture all
the incoming messages (this system was for an early form of email) to
ensure they were retained long enough to be properly processed. The
data was written to alternate tracks, as the head moved toward the
spindle and then to the unused tracks on the way out. Then older data
was over-written as new came in.
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