[nmglug] Dell 600m and FC3

[WA7BSZ]

In Reply to:

---------------------------------------------------
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 17:32:54 -0600 (MDT)
> From: "William D. Nystrom" <wdn at lanl.gov>
> Subject: [nmglug] Using Media Bay Devices In Dell 600m With Fedora
> 	Core 3
> To: "NMGLUG.org mailing list" <nmglug at nmglug.org>
> Message-ID: <34032.128.165.0.81.1118014374.squirrel at webmail.lanl.gov>
> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
> 
> I have a Dell 600m that I have installed Fedora Core 3 on the primary hard
> drive.  The laptop has a media bay where I can swap in and out a CDRW/DVD
> combo drive, a second battery or a second hard drive.  I've just installed
> FC 3 and so am trying to complete getting things set up.  I have another
> laptop with linux on it, including all of my files which I want to move
> over to this Dell 600m.  So, I got the idea of pulling the hard drive out of
> it and putting it in the media bay hard drive caddy for the 600m so that I
> could boot up and mount it and just copy files over.  However, I have not
> been able to get this to work.  I've made sure that the BIOS is set up so
> that I am not trying to boot from this media bay hard drive.  Am I missing
> something?  Is this more complex than I was imagining?  Additionally, once
> I was booted up with the CDRW/DVD installed and decided to see if I could
> remove it.  When I did, the system froze.  So, I'm wondering if linux will
> allow me to hot swap devices in the media bay and if so, what is involved
> to make that work.
> 
> Thanks for any advice,
> 
> -- 
> Dave Nystrom
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My experience so far with Fedora of any number, used on a laptop, is great
frustration.  Now I save myself this frustration by not giving in to the
temptation to try Fedora on a laptop (after all, its free).  I would rather
waste my time on something more fun.  Red Hat is interested in the profitable
Enterprise stuff, and apparently laptops are not in that arena.  

The first distro that ran everything on my old Dell laptop was Knoppix.  Then I
got Suse 9.0 to run everything too.  But never Fedora.  How about Ubuntu? 
Others are having a lot of success with their laptops and Ubuntu.

I think you have to figure out how to manually shut off the  bay CD before you
can remove it.  I remember that to take out a PCMCIA device I had to turn it
off with the cardctl command.

pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/man/cardctl.8.html

Linux was made to follow Unix, and Unix was a good operating system for many
users.  When you have a computer with 100 users you just can't let any one of
them arbitrarily remove a CD or a floppy.  And it wasn't made for laptops with
all their removable devices.  So it is made so that it is a lot harder to just
remove peripherals.  For one thing, It always wants root to authorize the
removals.  It doesn't want any Joe Bloe user to be able to just pop out the
CDRW.  Someone else might need it for their process, for all it knows.  It is
actually a lot more secure, but frustrating if you are used to your windows
laptop.  Even in windows you are supposed to click on the manager icon and tell
it you are going to remove the bay.  Otherwise it complains, but seems to
recover most the time.  

Someone else in this group probably knows what command to issue to make it
possible to remove the CD bay, or whatever is in the bay.  I would like to see
what it is myself.

Here is something from a page:  http://stacywebb.biz/LinuxonDellLaptop.html

"I had to force the recognition of the internal bay hard drive by supplying the
following command line when you receive the boot prompt:

boot: linux hdc=13424,15,63

(the numbers were eventually figured out one time when the drive was
auto-detected)."

Maybe his drive was autodetected one time when he took it out of the bay and
put it in the hard drive slot directly?


		
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