Managing Removable Media Overview

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.

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.