Re: Making external drive non-removable

Tom Stiller <tomstiller@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:

> In article <V_wck.717$713.428@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>  Wes Groleau <groleau+news@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>> Douglas Alan wrote:
>> > spinning down, I made a little cron job that cats a file on the disk
>> > every few minutes.  Sometimes, however cat doesn't even see the file.
>> > I.e., it's gone tem****arily missing, while the drive is contemplating
>> > its navel.  (I know for sure this happens, as I get an email from
>> > cron every time that it does.)
>> 
>> Would either of these work?
>> 
>> # one
>> while (your favorite infinite loop method); do
>>    echo "this sucks" > /Volumes/drive/catch
>>    sleep 5 # seconds, not minutes
>>    cat /Volumes/drive/catch > /dev/null
>>    sleep 5 # seconds, not minutes
>> done

This is effectively what I do now, albeit with a longer sleep time.  I
suppose it can't hurt to lower the sleep time.  The symptoms are a bit
strange, as the sleep time I chose is well below the auto-sleep time
for the disk drive.  (Or at least what it's do***ented to be.)  And my
solution worked fine for several months, but then it stopped working
reliably at some point.  I thought the drive might be failing because
of the change in behavior, but I'm able to backup the drive and the
like without any trouble at all.

>> # two
>> touch /Volumes/drive/catch  # make sure the file is there
>> tail -f /Volumes/drive/catch > /dev/null &  # open it and keep it open

That's a good idea.  I'll try that.

> Or start a shell, cd to /Volumes/drive, and minimize the window.

That's also a good idea.  I'll try that too.

|>oug