You determine the presence of a disk in a drive by passing an ioexttd to the device with td_changestate set in io_command. for quick i/o, you must set io_Flags to IOF_QUICK. DiskIO->iotd_Req.io_Flags = IOF_QUICK; DiskIO->iotd_Req.io_Command = TD_CHANGESTATE; BeginIO((struct IORequest *)DiskIO); td_changestate returns the presence indicator of a disk in io_actual. the value returned will be zero if a disk is currently in the drive and nonzero if the drive has no disk.