Re: PCMCIA cards in laptops: do they need to be mounted/unmounted when installed/removed?

Thanks everyone for the replies. If I understand them correctly, the
situation is as follows:

PCMCIA cards can be hot plugged and hot unplugged just like for instance
USB devices.

However, also like USB devices, if the PCMCIA card is or contains a
mobile storage device, to gain access to the storage on the device it
has to be mounted. Likewise, before such a PCMCIA card, like USB
storage devices, is removed, it should be unmounted in the same manner.

As it happens, I still have a PCMCIA adapter for CF cards, which is what was used to connect CF cards to laptops before the days of USB ports on laptops. So I put a CF card in it and inserted it into a PCMCIA slot. "pcccardctl ident" returned:

product info: "HITACHI", "FLASH", "5.0", ""
manfid: 0x0007, 0x0000
function: 4 (fixed disk)

Dmesg however told me much more. It produced the following:

Probing IDE interface ide2...
hde: Hitachi XX.V.3.4.0.0, CFA DISK drive
ide2 at 0x100-0x107,0x10e on irq 10
hde: max request size: 128KiB
hde: 2002896 sectors (1025 MB) w/1KiB Cache, CHS=1987/16/63
hde: hde1
ide-cs: hde: Vpp = 0.0

Sure enough, I found a directory called /dev/hde1. By creating directory /media/pccfcard and running "mount -t vfat /dev/hde1 /media/pccfcard" I had complete access to the cf card. I then added an appropriate line to /etc/fstab, which I will test after the next time I boot my laptop.

It is interesting that the adapter manufacturer is identified as Hitachi; whereas the adapter is labelled Sandisk.

I also noticed that pccardctl includes the commands insert and eject. Since the cards can be hot inserted and removed, I wonder why have these two commands.

Regards,

Ken Heard
Toronto, Canada


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