Chapter 17 Managing Removable Media (Overview)

This chapter provides general guidelines for managing removable media in the Solaris environment.

This is a list of the overview information in this chapter.

• What's New in Managing Removable Media?

• Where to Find Managing Removable Media Tasks

• Removable Media Features and Benefits

• Comparison of Automatic and Manual Mounting

• What You Can Do With Volume Management

What's New in Managing Removable Media?

Volume management features have been improved 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.

You can use both the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) volume management and the Solaris command line to fully manage removable media.

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 x86 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 x86 system.

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

Where to Find Managing Removable Media Tasks

Use these references to find step-by-step instructions for managing removable media.

Removable Media Management Task	For More Information
Access removable media	Chapter 18, Accessing Removable Media (Tasks)
Format removable media	Chapter 19, Formatting Removable Media (Tasks)
Write data and music CDs	Chapter 20, Writing CDs (Tasks)

For information on using removable media with File Manager in the Common Desktop Environment, see Solaris Common Desktop Environment: User's Guide.

Removable Media Features and Benefits

The Solaris environment gives users and software developers a standard interface for dealing with removable media. Referred to as volume management, this interface provides three major benefits:

• By automatically mounting removable media, it simplifies their use. (For a comparison between manual and automatic mounting, see the following section.)

• It enables you to access removable media without having to become superuser.

• It allows you to give other systems on the network automatic access to any removable media on your local system. For more information, see Chapter 18, Accessing Removable Media (Tasks).

Comparison of Automatic and Manual Mounting

The following table compares the steps involved in manual mounting (without volume management) and automatic mounting (with volume management) of removable media.

Table 17–1 Comparison of Manual and Automatic Mounting

Steps	Manual Mounting	Automatic Mounting
1	Insert media.	Insert media.
2	Become superuser.	For diskettes, use the volcheck command.
3	Determine the location of the media device.	Volume manager (vold) automatically performs many of the tasks previously required to manually mount and work with removable media.
4	Create a mount point.
5	Make sure you are not in the mount point directory.
6	Mount the device using the proper mount options.
7	Exit the superuser account.
8	Work with files on media.	Work with files on media.
9	Become superuser.
10	Unmount the media device.
11	Eject media.	Eject media.
12	Exit the superuser account.

What You Can Do With Volume Management

Essentially, volume management enables you to access removable media just as manual mounting does, but more easily and without the need for superuser access. To make removable media easier to work with, you can mount removable media in easy-to-remember locations.

Table 17–2 How to Access Data on Removable Media Managed by Volume Manager

Access	Insert	Find the Files Here
Files on the first diskette	The diskette and enter volcheck	/floppy
Files on the first removable hard disk	The removable hard disk and enter volcheck	/rmdisk/jaz0 or /rmdisk/zip0
Files on the first CD	The CD and wait for a few seconds	/cdrom/volume-name
Files on the first DVD	The DVD and wait for a few seconds	/dvd/volume-name
Files on the first PCMCIA	The PCMCIA and wait for a few seconds	/pcmem/pcmem0

If your system has more than one type of removable device, see the following table for their access points.

Table 17–3 Where to Access Removable Media

Media Device	Access File Systems With This Path	Access Raw Data With This Path
First diskette drive	/floppy/floppy0	/vol/dev/aliases/floppy0
Second diskette drive	/floppy/floppy1	/vol/dev/aliases/floppy1
First CD-ROM drive	/cdrom/cdrom0	/vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0
Second CD-ROM drive	/cdrom/cdrom1	/vol/dev/aliases/cdrom1
First removable hard disk	/rmdisk/jaz0 /rmdisk/zip0	/vol/dev/aliases/jaz0 /vol/dev/aliases/zip0
First PCMCIA drive	/pcmem/pcmem0	/vol/dev/aliases/pcmem0