Improvements to Volume Management (vold)

Starting in the Solaris Express 12/06 release, vold is removed. For information about managing removable media with vold in Solaris 10 releases, see System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

Solaris Express 11/05: Removable media management is improved. Previously, vold did not create device links for removable devices that contain no media. Now, device links are properly created for devices that contain no media, similar to the following:

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root     28 Jun 13 13:09 /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0 ->
 /vol/dev/rdsk/c2t2d0/nomedia

Now, you can use the cdrw and rmformat commands to list devices that have no media when vold is running.

You can revert back to the previous vold behavior by changing the following support nomedia entry in the /etc/vold.conf file as follows:

support media

Then, restart vold.

In addition, vold is now hot-plug aware. This improvement means that if you insert removable media, the media is automatically detected and mounted by vold. There should be no need to restart vold manually to recognize and mount a file system from any removable media device.

If you are using a legacy or non-USB diskette device, then you might need to issue the volcheck command before vold can recognize the media.

If the media is detected, but for some reason, is unmounted, then you'll need to run the following commands:

# volrmmount -i rmdisk0

Before you hot-remove a removable media device, eject the media first. For example:

# eject rmdisk0