Hiding uneeded USB drive icons

Way back when in Iyonixtime you could hide uneeded USB drive icons by editing a text file called Hide in !Boot.

Those on the list were made invisible.

Am I right in thinking that this is no longer supported on a BeagleBoard?

If it is then the next question is which version of the Hide file do you edit (there are copies of it peppered right accross !Boot – I am guessing it is one of those things that needs housekeeping!)?

All I want to do is get rid of an icon (to get below 4 again) when I connect my portable media player as it shows up as two drives.

It resides in Choices:SCSIFS.Hide (aka Boot:Choices.SCSIFS.Hide)
any other copies are redundant and can be removed.

When reading a compact-flash card in a USB 2 card reader four SCSI::0 to SCSI::3 icons appear on iconbar but…..Hide (Boot.Choices.SCSIFS) shows:

Generic USB SD Reader 1.00
Generic USB SM Reader 1.00
Generic USB MS Reader 1.00

My question is if Hide works properly shouldn’t I only see a single icon for the CF card?

Has anyone else got this to work?

RISC OS 5.19 (15-Jan 12)

I’ve not used the feature, but perhaps the names in the Hide file don’t match the names that your device returns?

Hide seems to work but there is an anomaly. If you plug the reader containing a CF card into a USB hub only one icon (the CF one) is visible on iconbar. When the reader is disconnected then the icon disappears exactly as you would expect.

If you leave the reader in situ and re-boot the machine all four icons appear on the iconbar. This is not a big deal but surely Hide should operate after a re-boot.

surely Hide should operate after a re-boot

This may be a side effect of the poorly thought out use case of the ‘Hide’ file. It was conceived for the Iyonix where the boot drive is ADFS and the SCSIFS module is/was softloaded during boot (therefore Choices$Path is defined).

Where SCSIFS is in ROM, or the boot drive is itself SCSIFS (as is the case of the Beagleboard) then Choices$Path is undefined at the point where the card reader is enumerated.

You may be able to force a reappraisal of the drives with *USBDISCOVER
but really the ‘Hide’ file is a hack that needs some reengineering (for example, storing the vendor and product ids in CMOS).

Well explained – thanks.

For Your Info……… *USBDISCOVER is ignored

You could probably do a little BASIC program with a fake Service_SCSIDetached to tell SCSIFS that drives 1 to 3 have been removed, but we’re changing the horribleness of ‘Choices:SCSIFS.Hide’ with some horribleness of equal magnitude!

On my Iyonix I’ve put the following into predesk (called !ResetSCSIFS) to reset the SCSIFS module.

| SCSIFS Bodger JAD 27/02/12

| The SCSIFS V1.23 in V5.18 has a bug whereby it attempts to read the
| SCSIFS Hide file before the Boot: path is setup.
| So reset the module to get it to reload if it is ROM resident.
| We assume that 1.24 will have this fixed.

Set SCSIFS_PatchReq 0
Set SCSIFS_Present 1
RmEnsure SCSIFS 1.24 Set SCSIFS_PatchReq 1
RmEnsure SCSIFS 1.23 Set SCSIFS_Present 0
If <SCSIFS_PatchReq> = 1 Then If <SCSIFS_Present> = 1 Then RmReinit SCSIFS
Unset SCSIFS_PatchReq
Unset SCSIFS_Present

Thanks for your reply Jeff. I see your patch is for the Iyonix for which I have been using the excellent !HideSCSI (V1.03) by Colin Granville. I tried your patch on my Beagleboard -xM but it doesn’t work. As you state lets hope this is fixed in the SCSIFS, V1.24 release.

As you state lets hope this is fixed in the SCSIFS, V1.24 release.

It isn’t! SCSIFS 1.26 still has the problem. Anyone using my code above will need to change the 1.24 above to 1.27.

I had hoped that the module would re-read the hide file on one of the module service entries.

Is this directly related to ticket #309?

Ah yes, that’s the one.