Never ceases to amaze

[Duane Attaway]

On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Jim Herrmann wrote:

> It never ceases to amaze me when I put in a new piece of hardware and
> boot linux.  At least, when I replace a piece of hardware.  No drivers
> to install, no hassle, no reboot two times to unistall the old hardware
> and twice more to install the new.  It's times like these that I really
> feel justified in tumbing my nose at the winblows die hards.  This is
> plug and play baby!

What?!  You mean you rebooted and passed up a perfectly good chance to 
play a game of hardware roulette?

I remember hot swapping hard drives for about two years.  Yes, I was
rolling the dice and doing hardware changes in the fast lane.  Finally I
got to experience the even electronic engineers call "SCR latchup."  Its
when the voltage levels of the inputs are biased at the right place before
the voltage supply rails come up and the silicon junctions simulate an SCR
and clamp down on the supply, cooking the chip and possibly the
motherboard.

One fateful day, it happened.  I noticed the drive I just plugged in
wasn't readable.  I took out the secondary IDE channel and it did
something interesting two drives attatched to it.  The motherboard could
never use that channel again.  Those two drives would work, but never with 
each other.  But it did cost me a reboot.  And an IDE channel.

http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/35-05/latchup/

--
Programming C shells by the sea shore since 1994.
http://dattaway.org