Mounting USB Mass Storage Devices With or Without vold Running (System Administration Guide: Basic Administration)

System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

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Mounting USB Mass Storage Devices With or Without `vold` Running

If you are running Solaris Common Desktop Environment (CDE), the USB removable mass storage devices are managed by the Removable Media Manager component of the CDE File Manager. For more information on the CDE File Manager, see dtfile(1).

Note –

You must include the /usr/dt/man directory in your MANPATH variable to display the man pages listed in this section. You must also have the /usr/dt/bin directory in your path and have CDE running to use these commands, or have a DISPLAY variable set to use these commands remotely.

The following table identifies the commands Removable Media Manager uses to manage storage devices from the CDE environment.

Command	Man Page	Task
`sdtmedia_format`	`sdtmedia_format(1)`	Format and label a device
`sdtmedia_prop`	`sdtmedia_prop(1)`	Display properties of a device
`sdtmedia_prot`	`sdtmedia_prot(1)`	Change device protection
`sdtmedia_slice`	`sdtmedia_slice(1)`	Create or modify slices on a device

After the USB device is formatted, it is usually mounted under the /rmdisk/label directory. For more information on configuring removable storage devices, see rmmount.conf(4) or vold.conf(4).

The device nodes are created under the /vol/dev directory. For more information, see scsa2usb(7D).

You can use USB mass storage devices without the volume manager (vold) running. Here are two ways to avoid using the volume manager.

Stop vold by issuing this command:
# /etc/init.d/volmgt stop
Keep vold running, but do not register the USB mass storage devices with it. Remove volume manager registration of USB mass storage devices by commenting the following line in the /etc/vold.conf file, like this:
# use rmdisk drive /dev/rdsk/c*s2 dev_rmdisk.so rmdisk%d
After this line is commented, restart vold.
# /etc/init.d/volmgt start
Caution –
If you comment out this line and other SCSI or ATAPI Zip or Jaz removable devices are in the system, vold registration for these devices would be disabled as well.

For more information, see vold.conf(4).

The following procedures describe how to manage USB mass storage devices without vold running. The device nodes are created under the /dev/rdsk directory for character devices and under the /dev/dsk directory for block devices. For more information, see scsa2usb(7D).