Tim: >> I do wish things were done more like how it was on the Amiga: Device >> names were written into the device, as were volume names, and the file >> system (if you wanted it to be). Plugging the drive into anything meant >> it was labelled and identified the same on any computer. Les Mikesell: > What happened when you moved drives around or image-copied them > and ended up with two of the same label in the same machine? Did > it do something reasonable or refuse to boot? What did it do > with filesystems using different conventions? It did some reasonable things... You had a boot menu that could pick the drive to boot from, that was part of the firmware - no GRUB or LILO nastiness. Each drive had a boot priority, stored on the drive. That did allow you to rip drives in and out, and not have to do any messing about. The fallback would be booted, automatically, if need be. Determined by the drives themselves, not any external configuration. Whichever drive was booted was known as the SYS: drive, and any sensible person would write their boot scripts to use SYS: as the root, if they wanted it to boot completely from just that drive. If you tried to put in two "HD0:" named drives (first Hard Disk - yes they also count from zero), the second would be come "HD0.1:". Likewise, if you put in two drives with a "Data:" volume name. If you really needed it the other way around, there was an extremely simple solution: Swap the drives around. Though we tended to avoid that by using device names peculiar to drives (e.g. SDH0: for the first Seagate HD partition/drive, QDH0: for a Quantum one, but the choice of names was up to the user). Likewise, with volume labels (Workbench, System, Data, Programs, whatever). Generally, things worked by volume labels, and it didn't matter what the device label was. Each drive could use different filesystems, if you wanted. Even the partitions could, though I can't recall if you could store custom file systems per partition (I think so). Storing them on the drive meant that you could transplant a drive between boxes, and not require that the other box had the file system installed into the OS. All in all, it was rather neat at how it handled such things. I certainly miss the ease that I could swap drives around between boxes. Though, more so, I miss the fact that one OS was installed on my system for umpteen years with *no* need of replacement or repair. Applications were another matter, but the longevity of the OS was a godsend. -- (Currently testing FC5, but still running FC4, if that's important.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
