click-click in floppy disk drive

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 24 Oct 2013, leeoliveshackelford at surewest.net wrote:

> After logging-in as toor, I entered the following commands.  The comments describe the result.
>
> service hald stop [enter]
> # The clicking stops.
> service hald start [enter]
> # The clicking resumes.

HAL is polling the drive to detect media changes.  There are 
configuration files to that can be modified to tell HAL to ignore the 
device.  Others can probably offer more advice on that.  I've been 
HAL-free for the last couple of years with xfce4.

Likewise, there is another program that scans mounted media in order to 
refresh the desktop and file utilities when files have been added or 
removed.  Unfortunately, I can't recall what that program is called at 
the moment, but it can be told to ignore certain files and directories. 
After that, removable media can be easily unmounted.

If you want a desktop without all the work of installing it, PC-BSD 
offers a choice of four, including xfce4.