Re: attach & detach drives under Linux

Devfs is dead and now deprecated.  (Don't I look silly for saying
this?!?! LOL)

You're in quite the conundrum there - if you stick with devfs.  Because
the nodes won't be there until they're recognized.  That's the beauty of
devfs - and in your case, the ugly!

I'll be curious to hear of how you settle this.  I think the most sane
route is not using devfs for your program.

regards,

farmerdude



On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 17:11, Simson Garfinkel wrote:
> As some of you know, I am developing a new drive imaging program. It  
> runs pretty well under FreeBSD and I'm trying to get it to work under  
> Linux.
>
> One of the problems I'm having under Linux is the difficulty of  
> attaching and detaching IDE drives .(I've discovered that imaging  
> failing drives with a firewire or USB write-blocker is a disaster.)
>
> With FreeBSD this is quite easy: the atacontrol command has an  
> "attach" and a "detach" sub-commands, which allow you to attach and  
> detach devices on the IDE interface.
>
> The Linux hdparm command has a -U option or unregister an ATA device  
> and a -R option to register one. The problem is this: it also needs  
> to have a /dev/hda device if you are, for example, trying to register  
> or unregister device /dev/hda. But if you are using devfs, /dev/hda  
> disappears when it is unregistered and it's not there to register.
>
> Is there a simple way around this? (Other than booting knoppix, that  
> is.)