[KLUG Members] PC Cardbus CDROM on Vaio

[Adam Tauno WIlliams]

> > > My little VAIO desktop uses the Cardbus slot for the CD-ROM drive. When
> > > in Linux, can I just hotswap disconnect it when I don't need it or do I
> > > have to unmount it somehow? (XP always wants me to do it's equivalent of
> > > unmounting.)
> > What distribution?  Hot swapping devices under SuSe 9.1 has so far
> > worked flawlessly,  under RedHat I always did a mount/unmount or else
> > I'd run into problems.
> As I understand it, the main reason for explicitly unmounting drives is
> so that files get saved back to the drive properly. Since files don't
> get saved back to a CD-ROM drive, that shouldn't be a problem?

Correct, more or less anyway.

> Broader question: Do we mount file systems or devices?

Filesystems.   They're are many cases in which a mass-storage devices
does not contain a filesystem (an empty media changer, a raw device,
etc...)

>  When Linux is
> loading, it seems to look for the device, but when I plug the drive in
> after Linux is loaded and mount it from the command line, it will only
> mount it if there's a disk in the drive.

It is probably set in /etc/fstab (the filesystem table). The presence of
a block device reference in /etc/fstab informs Linux to check it for a
filesystem when it is detected (or when you tell it to).

For example, the entry for my CD writer looks like - 
/dev/cdrecorder      /media/cdrecorder    subfs     
fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0