Re: WTB: ThinkPad 755ce or cx

[Don Whiteside <dwhite@shadow.net>]

On Mon, 27 Nov 1995, Randy Whittle wrote:

> At 2:39 PM 11/27/95, kevin king wrote:

>         But as Don Whiteside pointed out, these are just standard IDE
> drives and by definition can't be hot-swapped.
> 
>         However, if you booted off a floppy and had a SyQuest drive that
> was your otherwise primary drive, yes, you could easily swap out a SyQuest
> cartridge for another one--as long as you didn't boot off the SyQuest.
> 
>         But then, a removable like a SyQuest is designed to do that.  
> IDE isn't.
>         Though I know SyQuest has IDE versions.  I don't know if you can do
> it with those--I'm only familiar with SCSI.

It's a somewhat different issue. If we disconnect an IDE drive, we remove 
it from the line. If you pop the cartridge on a Syquest IDE drive, the 
physical decive is still connected, but the media has been removed.

Booting off the device isn't the major issue - you can deal with those 
issues. More important is if the device is checked by the OS to see if 
there has been a disk change. Floppies are supposed to do this, Syquest 
drives do as well. However, most OSes don't check "fixed" drives for 
change lines. That's why there's usually a driver of some sort for those 
Syquests. You can use them w/o the dirver, but only if you don't change 
carts while the machine is on.