Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 18:33:13 +1000 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: IDE Zip drive, challenge! Message-ID: <199709120833.SAA02046@word.smith.net.au>
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OK, so we all know that there are IDE Zip drives out there, and moreover that they are pretty cheap. They perform fairly poorly, but media are cheap and the drives themselves are fairly ubiquitous. There's a local ISP building systems using them as boot drives for routers and terminal servers, simply because they can swap the OS on a system by rebooting it and changing disks. However, there are a couple of problems with these drives that need to be addressed by an enterprising IDE hacker with access to one of these drives. 1) The drive is not locked when the disk is mounted. 2) Once a disk has been ejected and another inserted, the disk reports an error condition that the IDE driver can't handle. In the case of 1), we need media lock/unlock support as for SCSI removables. This should be moderately easy. In the case of 2), the error is almost certainly a "media changed" notification. This status needs to be recognised and correctly acknowledged. In both cases, there should be ATAPI standards for dealing with these situations, and we can hope that Iomega have done the right thing and followed them. If you think that this is a job worth taking on, let us know and get to it! mike (ps. should we have a web resource somewhere where things like this can be publicised? I think that if we were to maintain a list of short, discrete tasks suitable for relative newcomers, we could attract a lot more interest in this sort of thing...)
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