Just recently got a new ultralight laptop, with both the floppy drive
and CDROM external (Dell Latitude CS). Allegedly, under Windows, one
can plug in the CDROM or the floppy without rebooting and it works
fine. Both the floppy and the CD plug into a proprietary expansion
port on side of the machine using the same cable.
(I say "allegedly", since I didn't even boot the installed
Windows before blowing it away, and the included Win2k has that new
bastard licensing scheme that won't install under VMWare, but that's
another post.)
I'm running 2.2.17pre4 (+ USB and a couple little fixes floated here
on the list), and have ide-cd compiled as a module.
Interestingly, the floppy drive works when hotplugged... apparently,
even though on boot there isn't a floppy drive connected to the
system, the controller's existence is enough for Linux.
No such luck with the CD. When the machine is booted with the CD
connected, the kernel assigns it /dev/hdc (so the external IDE is a
separate channel), but without the CD plugged it, it doesn't detect
anything on that device. "modprobe ide-cd; mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom"
gives the error "Can't locate module block-major-22".
If I boot with the CD connected, disconnect it after boot, and then
reconnect it, it works fine.
Is there any way to rescan the IDE bus for a device like this after
boot-time? I know with the PCMCIA drivers, I can connect a PCCard IDE
hard disk and get a new IDE bus, but I'm not sure if there's an
equivalent case here. Is this possible right now with Linux?
ian
-- ---- Ian Soboroff ian@cs.umbc.edu University of MD Baltimore County http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~ian- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 23 2000 - 21:00:22 EST