[nmglug] Dell 600m and FC3

William D. Nystrom wdn at lanl.gov
Mon Jun 6 15:37:42 PDT 2005


Thanks for the reply.

On Mon, June 6, 2005 4:16 pm, WA7BSZ said:
> 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
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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.

I was using RH FC3 because I've used RedHat alot in the past and had
a copy of the book with media.

I'm interested in other distros including kubuntu but was hoping to get
up and running with FC3 before beginning an exploration and comparison
of other distros.

> 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

I wonder if there is a general purpose HOWTO for linux on laptops which
would discuss some of these issues in a generic fashion.

> 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

I'll check this out.

> (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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-- 
Dave Nystrom
LANL X-2
Phone: 505-667-7913
Fax:   505-665-2227
Email: wdn at lanl.gov
Smail: Mail Stop T085
       Group X-2
       Los Alamos National Laboratory
       Los Alamos, NM 87545







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