RE: [?@yahoo.com: Found problem of floppy drive acces]

["Dave Korn" <dave dot korn at artimi dot com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-owner On Behalf Of Dave Korn
> Sent: 17 December 2004 17:24

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: cygwin-owner On Behalf Of Eric Schweitz
> > Sent: 17 December 2004 17:23
> 
> > ----- Forwarded message from Vijay Jaswal -----
> > 
> > Hello again,
> > 
> > I found where the floppy drive was being access and it's 
> > definately a problem of Cygwin.
> 
> 
>   No it is not.  It is WINDOWS that is accessing the drive and there is
> absolutely nothing cygwin can do to either cause or prevent this.

  Actually, that may not be strictly true.  Let me elaborate:

  The reason the floppy is being accessed is because some win32 api function or
other wants to check its status.  It is quite likely some function related to
drive or file properties or information, and it probably scans all the known
drive letters despite that being superfluous for most of them.

  It's not just cygwin, it's absolutely definitely part of windows.  For quite
some time my home PC used to always scan the floppy whenever I opened the "My
computer" window.  And if there's an A:\ path in the File...Open MRU list in
wordpad or similar, it will scan the floppy when it starts up.  So this is
natural windoze behaviour in lots of circumstances.

  So it is conceivable that this is a consequence of some system call that
cygwin makes to get drive info and it is also conceivable that there might be
some other way cygwin could get the same info using some other system call that
doesn't decide to scan the floppy.

  But it's also conceivable that there's no way to avoid this side-effect, and
it's certainly not a cygwin *bug* that it uses a bog-standard win32 api function
in the way it is supposed to be used and for the purpose it is supposed to be
used for; it is a *windows* bug that it superfluously scans the floppy.


    cheers, 
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....


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