Using a floppy

Using a Floppy (Solaris)

Purdue Engineering Computer Network

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Solaris provides a new tool called the Volume Manager which replaces the special commands cdmount, dosmount, fdmount, mountcd, and mountfd. The Volume Manager automatically detects when a CD-ROM or floppy disk has been inserted into the drive, and mounts it automatically.

To make use of a floppy disk, simply insert it into the disk drive, and it will be mounted by the Volume Manager.

NOTE

On many Sun hardware platforms, it is not possible to automatically detect the presence of a floppy disk in the drive. If the Volume Manager does not appear to mount your floppy disk, execute the volcheck command, which will tell the Volume Manager to go look for a disk in the disk drive.

Once you have inserted the floppy disk into the drive and, if necessary, executed the volcheck command, one of two things will occur:

1. If the floppy disk has not yet been formatted, you will see a couple of errors on the workstation console:

   
   
                fd0: read failed (40 1 0)
                fd0: bad format
   

   Nothing else will appear to happen. Before you can make use of the floppy disk, you must format it with the fdformat command. If you are using a high-density (1.44MB) disk, the following command will format the disk:

   
                % fdformat
        Press return to start formatting floppy in /vol/dev
   
         /rdiskette0/unformatted.
   

   If you are using a low-density (720KB) disk, use the -l option to fdformat.

   • If you would like to make an MS-DOS-compatible floppy disk, specify the -d option to the fdformat command. After formatting, eject the floppy disk with the eject command:

                     % eject floppy 

     Then insert it in the drive again, and type volcheck once more. The floppy disk can now be accessed as the directory /floppy/floppy0. Files which you place in this directory will be readable by MS-DOS systems. However, you are responsible for making any character conversions (such as carriage-return line-feed substitutions) required by the MS-DOS system. Once you are done with the disk, eject it using the eject command as described above.

   • If you would like to make a UNIX-compatible floppy disk, you must install a file system on the disk. To do this, use the newfs command:

          % /usr/sbin/newfs /vol/dev/aliases/floppy0
             /vol/dev/aliases/floppy0:  2880 sectors in 80
     
             cylinders of 2 tracks,18 sectors
     
                1.4MB in 5 cyl groups (16 c/g, 0.28MB/g, 128 i/g)
                super-block backups (for fsck -F ufs -o b=#) at:
                32, 640, 1184, 1792, 2336,
     

   After creating the file system, eject the floppy disk with the eject command:

                % eject floppy 

   Then insert it in the drive again, and type volcheck once again. The floppy disk can now be accessed as the directory /floppy/floppy0. Once you are done with the disk, eject it using the eject command as described above.

2. If the floppy disk has already been formatted, either with a UNIX or an MS-DOS file system, it will automatically be mounted as /floppy/floppy0. You can access the files in this directory just as if they were on your local workstation. Once you have finished with the disk, eject it from the disk drive with the eject command:

        % eject floppy