[ltp] UltraBay Slim removal

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Wed, 22 Apr 2009, Richard Neill wrote:
> What happens if the user is too quick for the system, and pulls it out  
> in one smooth motion? Does the system still crash hideously, or does it  
> manage to cope?

The user may damage his hardware, since the bay/dock will still be hot when
he unplugs (i.e. he will cause transient voltage spikes on buses and that
will slowly damage components.  One day (which might very well be the first
time he does it), something will give and he will need a new planar card).

BTW: bays might not hardcrash the machine.  Docks are almost guaranteed to.

If the whole thing doesn't crash the box with a hung PCI bus or northbridge,
there will be blood murder messages on the log, but nothing should crash
_because_ of the kernel anymore if it is a bay.  For docks, all bets are
off.

Don't Do That.  It is that simple.

> When I last tried this, even a relatively benign operation (pulling out  
> a currently-playing audio CD) would crash the machine. Is there a  
> graceful way to handle this now? What about nastier cases (eg a mounted  
> CD-ROM? A r/w mounted HDD with open files?)

Well, if it was a kernel crash, it is a bug (and likely fixed by now).  If
it is a hardware crash, well, Don't Do That :-)

In my T43 running Debian Lenny, 2.6.28 is doing everything required by
itself for the optical device.  I didn't try the bay battery.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh