RE: [MiNT] removable medias

["Julian Reschke" <reschke@medicaldataservice.de>]

> From: Petr Stehlik [mailto:joy@sophics.zln.cz]
> Sent: Monday, March 01, 1999 5:49 PM
> To: Julian Reschke
> Cc: mint@fishpool.com
> Subject: RE: [MiNT] removable medias
>
>
> > > empty floppy ---> system Alert asking me for inserting a floppy disk.
> >
> > First of all, this is exactly why SPIN is treating an empty
> drive identical
> > to a "blank" CD. This is usually more convenient than seeing
> the critical
> > error handler.
>
> well, anything is better than a modal AES alert "insert something into
> that drive". Actually simulating blank CD is a quite good idea since it's
> read-only so nobody would write to it. However with a floppy I would
> welcome if opendir() simply failed as it does with empty harddrive.

The behaviour is dependant on the BIOS driver, and which errors it judges
need to be reported using the critical error handler. For instance, the CEH
in MetaXBS usually does not report "write protected" through the CEH,
because there's nothing the user can do about that (for a CD).

> BTW I think our MiNTlib chdir() is broken - it shouldn't allow me to
> change dir into empty harddrive I think. It should return an error code
> instead.

If is empty (like in "partioned, but not written to yet") this is perfectly
ok.

> > If you want to get rid of the critical error handle, you can
> just install a
> > dummy one. I can send some sample code tomorrow, in case you need that.
>
> Yes, please. I would need to solve that very much. Though I wonder what
> kind of error handler it will be? Will it require hooking on trap vectors
> or something like that? I would need it for a kind of system clean
> application, no "TSR corner clock hack" this time ;-)

It uses the logical GEMDOS vectors, which is supported and "clean" both
under MiNT and TOS (and MagiC for that matter).

Regards, jr