SCAM and boot devices
Eddie.Williams
ewilliam at folsom.ColumbiaSC.NCR.COM
Tue Feb 13 12:35:50 PST 1996
* From the SCSI Reflector, posted by:
* ewilliam at folsom.ColumbiaSC.NCR.COM (Eddie.Williams)
*
On Feb 12, 11:25am, "Lohmeyer, John" wrote:
> Subject: Re: SCAM and boot devices
> * From the SCSI Reflector, posted by:
> * "Lohmeyer, John" <JLOHMEYE at cosmpdaero.ftcollinsco.ncr.com>
> *
> [soapbox on]
> The "right" solution is for the BIOS and OS vendors to solve the problem.
> The BIOS guys need to examine the volume labels on all of the mounted media
> and pick the boot device (or allow the user to pick the boot device as with
> OS/2's boot manager). This is more work than just always booting from ID 0
> or ID 6, but it is necessary to support the Plug-and-Play philosophy.
>
> The OS vendors need to adopt a more flexible solution to media management
> than merely assigning drive letters in the physical media order. Jumbling
> drive letters is almost as bad as not booting.
>
> Apple Computer has solved this problem years ago by not using drive letters
> and instead naming the disk volumes. It is time for the other OS vendors to
> borrow this enlightened idea. I've expressed this thought to several
> Microsoft people and have always been pushed back with statements like,
> 'Drive letters are really engrained -- maybe in the product after the one
> we've working on now'. Unfortunately, this is one of the reasons PCs remain
> more difficult to use than Macs.
> [soapbox off]
This only helps for disks. What about tapes, CDs, printers, etc? Writing
to the wrong tape could cause some serious problems too.
Eddie Williams
Ed.Williams at ColumbiaSC.NCR.COM
(803) 939-2073
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