arbarnhart
Senior Member
- Jan 1, 2013
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I am confused. What damage might be done to the tablet by unmounting a flash drive?
USB Host Mode & OTG Cable
- Thread starter jajones82
- Start date
- Nov 8, 2011
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I suggest you read the thread, most people don't read them, this thread was started caused a person was having problems unmounting, so if the problem exist then continue unmounting is causing problems.
Now seeing I have zero problems hotswaping, yet these people have problems unmounting, only makes sense to stop unmounting. If your hand hurts when you put it into a fire, best suggestion is to stop putting your hand into a fire.
What would be your suggestion? continue to unmount?
Last edited:
arbarnhart
Senior Member
- Jan 1, 2013
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I read it. What confused me was the use of the word "damage". I inferred that to mean something physical rather than just a crash. I prefer to use the unmount method, but I agree with you about not using it if the tablet crashed every time I used it. Just semantics.
- Nov 8, 2011
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Crashes means there a problem enough crashes, then damage can and does occur. The crash is an early warning sign to either fix the problem or stop doing the action causing the crash, ie unmount.
arbarnhart
Senior Member
- Jan 1, 2013
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Hardware damage? I wrote firmware for years, early in my career. Crashes rarely if ever cause hardware damage. I have never actually seen a case of it.
- Nov 8, 2011
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Lol, you are about to be a rich man then, there are many tablets right now damaged by crashes, just set up your shop and fix them.
I suggest starting with the Coby 7048 when it crashes the internal sdcard is damaged until you came along there was no fix, glad you showed up.
I suggest starting with the Coby 7048 when it crashes the internal sdcard is damaged until you came along there was no fix, glad you showed up.
arbarnhart
Senior Member
- Jan 1, 2013
- 178
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Physically damaged? If so, the hardware engineers should be flogged. During boot ROM development, crashing several times a day is common.
- Nov 8, 2011
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Again if you believe what you are saying. and can prove it you will be a rich man, all these crashes according to you will be fixed simply by reinstalling the firmware, I am telling you in two months you will be up there with Bill Gates, if you are right if you are wrong, well you will be in the same spot you are now.
Your theory can be proved or disproved easy enough, if reinstalling the firmware fixes the problems with crashes people have, such as damaging the internal sdcard, permanent bricks, you will be set, as we both know firmware is free, you can download it pretty much everywhere, then reinstall the firmware on all the damaged tablets, charge $25 per install and be rich in no time, I would do it myself, but I know the reinstall of firmware wont fix the problems, cause the problem is beyond software.
You can get a lot of Coby customers, just from this forum. I can't believe I am taking to the next Bill Gates.
arbarnhart
Senior Member
- Jan 1, 2013
- 178
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It's hard to have a serious discussion when you are so sarcastic. I mean no disrespect when I debate a point. I doubt there is much money to be made rescuing cheap Androids, but I am almost certain they could be. If the boot loader is corrupted, then you may have to crack the case and use a hardware programmer to get it operational so you could argue that it isn't just software, but again it is largely semantics. I don't think they are physically damaged because I think they can be made operational without replacing any parts. The bricked tablets I know of usually had their troubles caused by fiddling with the kernel code or running applications with root privilege, not by a regular user performing a supported operation, like unmounting. Not every crash corrupts the system; in fact the number that do is incredibly small. Anyway, I will give up on my semantic point and say there is a chance that what you say is correct, but I don't think it is all that relevant. But I won't carry on in a debate that lacks civility.
Most of us don't have unmount crashes, so it seems like there is something else wrong. Hot swapping may work and hide this symptom of the problem. If the OP just wants to sweep it under the rug, then hot swap may be the way to go.
Most of us don't have unmount crashes, so it seems like there is something else wrong. Hot swapping may work and hide this symptom of the problem. If the OP just wants to sweep it under the rug, then hot swap may be the way to go.
I wouldn't just pull a USB drive out of the socket without unmounting it. It's a generally bad idea, and that's not what "hot swapping" or "hot plugging" means.
Hot swapping/plugging just means that you can plug and unplug devices without shutting the system down, and without significant interruptions to the operation of the system---e.g., you don't have to power down, plug or unplug devices, and reboot.
USB was designed for hot swapping, but not for rudely disconnecting devices that are still mounted, especially not storage devices. You can often get away with it with FAT file systems, but I wouldn't count on it, especially if you're not very sure that all outstanding reads and writes by all apps using the device have completed. (And even then, it's risky.)
Programs and/or the OS may buffer a bunch of stuff in RAM to be streamed out to a USB device asynchronously, while the program goes on to do something else. From the point of view of the user and even the program, the file write may have completed and the the file may even have been closed, but there's still stuff in RAM waiting to actually be written out to the USB device.
Unmounting ensures that any stuff waiting to be written to the device is written before the unmount completes---once it's unmounted you know there's NOT stuff hanging around in RAM that's supposed to be on your flash stick or whatever.
If unmounting is causing problems, the right thing to do isn't generally to just unplug without unmounting---that is just not how UNIX kernels or (any sane system) is designed to work. The right thing to do is to find out what's going wrong before the unmounting, that turns unmounting into a problem when it shouldn't be. Something is wrong, and needs fixing, and it's generally a bad idea to mask such problems and potentially create new and worse ones by using the system in a way it fundamentally wasn't designed to be used.
Hot swapping/plugging just means that you can plug and unplug devices without shutting the system down, and without significant interruptions to the operation of the system---e.g., you don't have to power down, plug or unplug devices, and reboot.
USB was designed for hot swapping, but not for rudely disconnecting devices that are still mounted, especially not storage devices. You can often get away with it with FAT file systems, but I wouldn't count on it, especially if you're not very sure that all outstanding reads and writes by all apps using the device have completed. (And even then, it's risky.)
Programs and/or the OS may buffer a bunch of stuff in RAM to be streamed out to a USB device asynchronously, while the program goes on to do something else. From the point of view of the user and even the program, the file write may have completed and the the file may even have been closed, but there's still stuff in RAM waiting to actually be written out to the USB device.
Unmounting ensures that any stuff waiting to be written to the device is written before the unmount completes---once it's unmounted you know there's NOT stuff hanging around in RAM that's supposed to be on your flash stick or whatever.
If unmounting is causing problems, the right thing to do isn't generally to just unplug without unmounting---that is just not how UNIX kernels or (any sane system) is designed to work. The right thing to do is to find out what's going wrong before the unmounting, that turns unmounting into a problem when it shouldn't be. Something is wrong, and needs fixing, and it's generally a bad idea to mask such problems and potentially create new and worse ones by using the system in a way it fundamentally wasn't designed to be used.
BTW, there are right-angled host cables (and OTG capable hubs) that have a plug that turns the other way---so it wouldn't block the HDMI port on the a2109.
On ebay, include "left angled" in your search for host/OTG/USB cables, and you should find them.
left angle micro host OTG | eBay
On ebay, include "left angled" in your search for host/OTG/USB cables, and you should find them.
left angle micro host OTG | eBay
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