Using HideSCSI!

I haven’t used HideSCSI for a while so maybe I’m are doing something wrong!
If with !HideSCSI I generate a HideSCSI file to say disable two slots on a four slot card reader. Reboot the computer and then plug the card reader in, two slots are hidden and we get two SCSIFS icons as expected. But if we have the card reader plugged in at power up we get four SCSIFS icons.
I thought that the facility to hide SCSIFS icons was added so that Iyonix PCs that had built in four slot card readers could hide one or more so that USB pens/drives could be inserted.
Same results on Pi RC14 and a January build and on an Iyonix 5.20
What am I doing wrong or has something broken HideSCSI?

You’ve tripped up on bug 309 (subject mirror if the tracker is being slow).

Basically the HideSCSI concept was both poorly thought out and poorly executed, since it assumed that the path the HideSCSI was known prior to SCSIFS starting which it would be when SCSIFS was loaded in the boot sequence. Once SCSIFS went in ROM (5.14?) that was no longer the case, and the poor design came back to haunt.

It’s partially fixed in that !Boot now sends a service call when the path variables are set up, now SCSIFS just needs modifying to defer looking for HideSCSI until after it’s ready.

Much the same problem exists for MimeMap (now in ROM, wants to load something from !Boot) but unlike MimeMap you can’t just blunt RMReinit it, because you might be booting from SCSIFS and RMReiniting it at that point would be not good.

Purists should look away now…

One solution would be to check if Boot$Dir was set to SCSI::…. and RMReInit SCSIFS if it wasn’t. I guess many users will be booting from SDFS or ADFS, so this might work for them.
(I know it’s a cludge! I did say purists should look away! Until someone fixes SCSIFS it’s all we have though, and as it’s getting on for 4 years since the bug was reported, I’m not holding my breath!)

Out of curiosity, I popped a “*RMReInit SDFS” obeyfile into PreDesk on my Raspberry Pi to see how badly it blows up when you reinitialise the boot filesystem. Interestingly, nothing appeared to happen, the boot sequence completed normally!

Also see the old thread here.

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/920?page=1

Thanks for the info Sprow. We’ll have a play remreininting the module. n.b. re your mirror of the bug tracker, click on ticket 309 http://www.sprow.co.uk/tracker/tickets/309 gives:

Not Found
The requested URL /tracker/tickets/309 was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Thanks Jeff for the link, I had tried searching the form for ‘hidescsi’ which surprisingly doesn’t occur in that thread!

‘hidescsi’ which surprisingly doesn’t occur in that thread!

Err, yes it does, that’s how I found it!

Opps you are quite correct Jeff. Scanning down the search results I got to 2012 and thinking the problem can’t be that old I must have stopped looking.

re your mirror of the bug tracker, click on ticket 309 http://www.sprow.co.uk/tracker/tickets/309 gives

That’ll be why he calls it a “subject mirror”, ie. it only mirrors the subject lines :)