[ale] Auto-mount floppy in Fedora

[Kenneth W Cochran]

>Subject: RE: [ale] Auto-mount floppy in Fedora
>Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 08:50:50 -0500
>From: "Preston Boyington" <PBoyington at polyengineering.com>
>To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org>
>
>Kenneth W Cochran wrote:
>> As I remember, even Plain Old DOS (or perhaps more specifically,
>> *applications* in MS/PC-DOS) would indeed detect floppy-disk
>> changes, for example, the MS/PC-DOS "backup" command when
>> spanning multiple floppies.  You would get a message like
>> "disk change detected on drive <some letter>."  And/or some
>> program would not continue (e.g. backup) would not continue
>> until it detected a disk change.
>>
>> -kc
>
>I was under the impression that the application looked at the file on
>the disk and the file determined where it was in the series (disk 4 of
>7 for instance).  in fact i have several old programs in which the file
>names are "disk1", "disk2", etc.

That would be *some* applications.  :)  (or maybe :()
All the versions of DOS' (native) "backup" pgm I
ever tried/used would happily overwrite a floppy
if you merely removed & reinserted it, with no disk
content/filename/sequence checking at all and not even a
warning/confirmation message.  :(  Backup would not continue
until it detected a disk change.  It did not, however,
check the disk contents.  This was one reason among some
others that DOS's backup program was severely frowned-on.

DOS even had/has an error/status message(s) along the
lines of "disk change error on drive ..." or "disk change
detected in drive ..."

Fwiw, Unix (& I daresay Linux & BSD as well) utilities such
as tar & cpio were hardly better in this regard.  {sigh}
The "cure" ended up being no longer using floppies for backup, period.

>I think PKZip spanned in a similar way with the zip file holding the
>information of its' place in the series.

Exactly, this is one of the Great Features of most every
"add-on" backup/archiving program I ever saw over what
was included with the OS itself.

>also i remember the disk drive being polled during the process, so that's
>how i figured it "knew" there was a different disk in the drive.

Yup, but that was/is application dependent.  :)

-kc