Removing CF from IDE Bus

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Thanks Dave,

I see now what was my illusion.
I was under impression that IDE to CF adapter would contain some
microcontroller that separated CF from IDE bus. And since you are saying
that CF is connected directly to IDE cable I see problem in my reasoning.

Thanks again,
Slobodan

PS:
Beside having controler on IDE cable would be a little strange now when I
think about it better

 

[Dave August]

No Problem Slobodan,

I guess that the CF designers figured that as long as they had all these
'smarts' in the card they'd do more with it and wanted it to directly plug
into the IDE cable.
BUT IMHO they really screwed this up.There should have been a seperate set
of I/O pins for IDE mode, and making the RESET pin be reset for either mode
was BIG mistake, since PCMCIA reset is active HIGH.
And yes this is why the USB adapters work, they have their own micro and can
do things however they please.

FWIW my preferd mode when building embedded controllers is to electrically
use the CF in PCMCIA mode so I can use hot swap, but just use the IO
registers and talk to it like it's in IDE mode, since the first 8 registers
are EXACTLY the same. Most embedded things can't afford the 12 address bits
and I just use sequential access. Of course my hadrware takes into account,
RESET and the other goofy things.

Dave

 

[Guest]

Dave and Slobodan,
Sorry I haven't gotten back to you, I've been travelling.

I appreciate your input, but I don't think it will solve the problem that we
have.

The main problem is that the user could remove the CF whenever they want
(even if we tell them not to), and we would like to be able to gracefully
recover from that event. If we have a FILE* open on the CF, and they remove
it, then the next time we try to access it, the system will hang. Similarly,
if we are in explorer, the card is removed, and you try to open that drive
through explorer, the system will hang forever. Is there any way we can
occasionally check if the disk is still there, or fail accessing the disk
without causing the system to hang?

Thanks!
MJ

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

MJ,

Let me ask again, Have you tried this on disks marked as removable?

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Guest]

We have had this problem with CF marked as removable and fixed (we have the
utility from SanDisk to change it).

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

MJ,

If you have problem with removable disks as well then there is very little
that I can help you with :-(

Try making your test application that when called can eject, remove/stop all
drivers that make a problem.

If you can make this then you can concentrate on detecting CF removal, if
you can't do this then it is useless to try to figure out if CF is there or
not.

Regards,
Slobodan