Managing Removable Media Overview

This functionality is updated for the Solaris 8 6/00 and the documentation updated again in the 10/00 software release.

Volume management features have been improved in the Solaris 8 6/00 software release to fully support removable media. This improvement means that DVD-ROMs, Iomega and Universal Serial Bus (USB) Zip drives and Jaz drives, CD-ROMs, and diskettes are mounted and available for reading when they are inserted.

Both the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) volume management and Solaris command-line features have been updated in this release. The information here adds to information on managing removable media in "Guidelines for Using CDs and Diskettes (Overview)" in System Administration Guide, Volume 1. For information on using File Manager to administer this feature, see "Using Removable Media Manager" in Solaris 8 User Supplement.

With the volume management improvements, you can:

• Format, label, and set read or write software protection on removable media with the new rmformat command. This command replaces the fdformat command for formatting removable media.

• Create and verify a PCFS file system on removable media with the mkfs_pcfs and fsck_pcfs commands.

• Create an fdisk partition and a PCFS file system on removable media on a SPARC system to facilitate data transfers to IA systems.

Guidelines for using removable media are:

• Use UDFS and PCFS to transfer data between DVD media.

• Use the tar or cpio commands to transfer files between rewritable media such as a PCMCIA memory card or diskette with a UFS file system. A UFS file system that is created on a SPARC system is not identical to a UFS file system on PCMCIA or to a diskette that is created on an IA system.

• Set write protection to protect important files on Jaz or Zip drives or diskettes. Apply a password to Iomega media.