My laptop (a Thinkpad T21) has a bay that can contain a battery, a 
floppy, or a cd drive.  If a drive is in there at boot time, it can use 
the drive; I can also suspend the machine and swap in a battery.  But I 
can't use the other drive, nor can I use either if I booted with the 
battery installed.

The ideal solutions would be either a driver that let me power down the 
bay and swap devices; at that point, the driver would scan the bay and
automatically detach the old device and attach the new one.  (That's 
the way things work if I boot win2k.)

Failing that, I'd like to have a command that I can use to do the 
detach and attach manually.  Or perhaps some way to tell the kernel 
"this device exists, even if you can't probe it".

Is there any way to do any of the above?  Hooks that would let me write 
the code?  Work to develop any of the above?  I'm running 1.5.1b2, 
rather than -current, because I need vmware, but if there's a -current 
solution I'll investigate pulling it up.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb