From: jstump@auntbea.austin.ibm.com (John E. Stump) Subject: Re: Bernoulli/SyQuest Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1993 15:32:01 GMT
In article <C1ItAI.2H4@ra.nrl.navy.mil> eric@tantalus.nrl.navy.mil (Eric Youngdale) writes:
>In article <1993Jan27.011248.8864@colorado.edu> drew@romeo.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) writes:
>>>(2) although the Syquest is a
>>>"mountable" hard disk, the partition table on the cartridge is only
>>>read once during boot up, so you are out of luck if you want to umount
>>>and mount a different cartridge while the system is up and running.
>>
>>Nope, you can change cartridges. Sending a BLKRRPART ioctl to the disk will
>>reread the partition table.
>
> It is actually better than that. The kernel should detect a disk
>change and automatically reread the partition tables when you try and remount
>the disk. It should also flush all of the buffers and so forth, so you should
>be able to change disks without any trouble. I would like to know if this is
>not the case for anyone. I know of at least one person who indicated that
>the automatic re-read of the partition table was working correctly.
>
>-Eric
OK, I tested this morning and it worked! Great work Eric!
There's one thing that still isn't perfect (not that I'm complaining,
just reporting): If I boot up Linux WITHOUT a cartridge in my Syquest, I
cannot later mount a cartridge in the drive. I get the message "device
does not exist" or some such message.
Obviously the boot up procedure does some validation and if there is no
cartridge to begin with, then the driver is unusable until another
reboot?
thanks again for the work on ST01/Syquest
john
-- inside IBM: jstump@auntbea.austin / outside IBM: jstump@netftp.austin.ibm.com"The government of Athens was democratic because the people took the law into their own hands." --Student Bloopers