[comp.sys.mac] Is is safe to veto disk re-insertion prompts?

eacj@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Julian Vrieslander) (12/05/86)

Often when I am swapping floppies or shutting down, the Mac Plus (running
System 3.2, Finder 5.3) will prompt me to insert a disk that was previously
ejected, and that has no apparent reason for needing re-insertion.  Maybe
this is a minor annoyance, but sometimes it means re-booting (eg. if you just
gave the disk to someone on his way to Tokyo).

I just discovered that the disk insertion prompt can be made to disappear
without inserting the disk, if you hit command-period.  This is handy, but
I wonder if there are situations where this is dangerous.  My best guess is
that the worst that can happen is that you might miss a FlushVol call to the
disk that was requested, which is no big deal if the disk was on the way to
the re-cycle box.

Any other opinions on this?

-- 
Julian Vrieslander     (607) 255-3594
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lsr@apple.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein) (12/08/86)

In article <1716@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> eacj@batcomputer.UUCP (Julian Vrieslander) writes:
>I just discovered that the disk insertion prompt can be made to disappear
>without inserting the disk, if you hit command-period.  This is handy, but
>I wonder if there are situations where this is dangerous.  My best guess is
>that the worst that can happen is that you might miss a FlushVol call to the
>disk that was requested, which is no big deal if the disk was on the way to
>the re-cycle box.
>

If you Command-. a disk switch box, the I/O call that was running will
return an error -53: volume off line.  (You can also get a -53 error if you
do an asynchronous I/O call to an off-line volume.)  

In most cases, this will result in an alert from the application.
(Sometimes you will get a bizarre message, however.)  If you cancel a
FlushVol, then the disk will not be updated.  If you do this when the
application is trying to load a resource (some CODE, for example) then the
application is likely to crash.

I wouldn't get into the habit of using this feature, but if the disk doesn't
exist anymore, then you have nothing to lose by trying it.

-- 
Larry Rosenstein

Object Specialist
Apple Computer

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