Being able to switch between floppy drive and cdrom drive.

apathas · 11-08-2003, 12:51 AM

Well I have been googling this question for a while with results.
I have a dell lattitude CSX which as external floppy and cdrom drive. So I can only have one device connected at any time.
My question being is that I want to be able to switch between the drives without having the reboot the systems. But I am not exactly sure where to start looking to solve this problem.

When either drive is pluged in they do get reconized and I can use them after boot. But unable to switch without rebooting.

I am running Slackware 9.1

Scruff · 11-08-2003, 01:29 AM

Well, this is a little out of my territory. I don't own a notebook (unfortuantely) so I don't have pcmcia support or any other such things you require, but have you tried unmounting the device before switching, and remounting after?

Like:
# umount /dev/cdrom (or whatever yours is)
# mount /dev/fd0

apathas · 11-08-2003, 02:26 AM

That though did come to mine But I get no device present when I attempt that. It was a good idea.

DavidPhillips · 11-08-2003, 03:46 AM

I believe you need to look at hotpluging, and probably PNP BIOS

man hotplug

http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net/

/bin/bash · 11-08-2003, 11:48 PM

This is just a suggestion you can try at your own risk of course. But try using modprobe and rmmod.

For example you remove the floppy and:
rmmod floppy
Install the cdrom and:
modprobe cdrom
And visa-versa.

apathas · 11-09-2003, 12:14 AM

Well Ill give them a try. I know that hotplug is enabled.

Ginux · 11-09-2003, 12:38 PM

Hey I remmember Dell used to supply a parallel port cable for the floppy aswell, that way you can have both peripherals at the same time.

Ginux