Re: [NTLK] card eject

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Fri Feb 06 2004 - 22:39:17 PST


Aux environs du 6/02/04 à 19:40 -0500, sous le titre "Re: [NTLK] card
eject", Dan prit sa plus belle plume pour écrire les mots suivants:
>Personally I like using SBM's Card Eject. This prepares the card for eject
>"like pressing the button once" and I believe shuts down the power to the
>card as well.

No, it doesn't.

>This package is really a necessity when the button is broken
>on your Newt. But it also avoids the "Grip of Death" where a package is
>currently in use and your Newton says "(enter name of package here) is
>currently being used, please reinsert the card or the card might be
>damaged". You reinsert (or remount) the card and everything is fine till
>you try to eject again and you get the same message. So without this
>package you can't remove the card safely. There are not many packages that
>cause this problem, but there are a few.

Newton packages are supposed to deactivate themselves. Theoretically,
they should be able to deactivate themselves while they no longer are
here. If they cannot do this, you get the message. The system
actually detects when a package tries to access the card.

This is not possible with ATA Support yet/unfortunately.

What Card Eject does is just that it tells all packages to deactivate
themselves, before the card is removed. It's just a way to avoid this
message. It doesn't power off the card.

Plus this power on/power off discussion is a little bit meaningless.
The linear cards are powered on on every access and powered off after
a small delay. The same thing happens with ATA cards but the delay is
longer (and you can set it in the preferences) because the ATA cards
need a boot-up before being usable and you don't want to do this boot
up timing very often. You can actually even see that kind of problems
with regular computers where you need the hard drive to spin up.
Fortunately, ATA cards aren't that slow to spin up.

>Card Eject is small, free, on UNNA, and works on any Newt with 2.x OS (I
>have not tried it on anything earlier). Just make sure you install it on
>the internal!

And don't use it with ATA cards. Use the built-in unmount feature
instead (which does more than what Card Eject does since Card Eject
doesn't unmount the store and the system can still access it and if
you have some pending transaction, you can have the reinsert this
card message even if you ran Card Eject, although this is very
unlikely).

Paul

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