 | What's New with Volume Management |
Volume management functionality continues to evolve with the Solaris 8 and update releases. With the Solaris 8 6/00 release, volume management features are improved to fully support removable media that can be connected to relevant hardware platforms. This improvement means that DVD-ROMs, Iomega USB Zip and Jaz drives, CD-ROMs, and diskettes are mounted and available for reading when inserted. For example, if a system has a DVD-ROM drive, volume management automatically mounts discs in the drive and displays information in the CDE File Manager. As another example, if a system has a USB port, you can connect third-party devices such as an Iomega Zip drive to the USB port. The Solaris 8 volume management software enables you to automatically access such third-party devices.
Both the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) volume management and Solaris command-line features are updated to provide full support.
With the volume management improvements you can perform the following tasks.
Use the new rmformat command to format, label, and set read or write software protection on removable media. The rmformat command replaces the fdformat command for formatting removable media. See “Using the rmformat Command to Format Diskettes” and the rmformat(1) manual page for more information.
Use the mkfs_pcfs(1M) and fsck_pcfs(1M) commands to create and verify a PCFS file system on removable media.
Create an fdisk partition and a PCFS file system on removable media on a SPARC-based system to facilitate data transfers to IA-based systems. See “Creating An Alternate fdisk Partition” for more information.
Use the CDE Removable Media Manager to format, protect, and view data on removable media devices such as diskettes, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, Iomega Zip, and Iomega Jaz devices.
NOTE
Zip drives work with the Solaris 7 release, with the Solaris 8 and Solaris 8 6/00 release with a workaround. Bug 4365456 reports that Zip drives don't work with the Solaris 8 10/00 release. At the time of writing, no workaround exists to enable Zip drivers to work with the Solaris 8 10/00 or Solaris 8 01/01 release. These problems are fixed in the Solaris 8 04/01 release. See “Accessing Jaz or Zip Drives” for more information.
Use the following guidelines for removable media.
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. Note that a UFS file system created on a SPARC system is not identical to a UFS file system on PCMCIA or to a diskette 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.