iomega zip drive with solaris
Fred D. Quintana
Does anyone know where I can find a Sparc Solaris 2.x driver for a
SCSI Iomega zip drive? I would really like to be able to use my zip
drive to transfer files back and forth from my Sun and my PC.
Thanks,
Fred Quintana
fredqu...@lucent.com
James K. Levie
fred@tatooine (Fred D. Quintana) wrote:
>Does anyone know where I can find a Sparc Solaris 2.x driver for a
>SCSI Iomega zip drive? I would really like to be able to use my zip
>drive to transfer files back and forth from my Sun and my PC.
>
First of all you don't actually need a special driver, assuming a SCSI zip.
The system SCSI drivers will work, but you'll need to get the format.dat
info for the drive... It's on www.iomega.com.
The bad news is that, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't any way to
create or access FAT file systems on Zip or Jaz drives from Sparc Solaris.
Richard L. Hamilton
James K. Levie wrote:
>
> fred@tatooine (Fred D. Quintana) wrote:
>
> >Does anyone know where I can find a Sparc Solaris 2.x driver for a
> >SCSI Iomega zip drive? I would really like to be able to use my zip
> >drive to transfer files back and forth from my Sun and my PC.
> >
> First of all you don't actually need a special driver, assuming a SCSI zip.
> The system SCSI drivers will work, but you'll need to get the format.dat
> info for the drive... It's on www.iomega.com.
It may be, but I haven't found it. They've re-done their site,
and also changed its IP address, but since www.iomega.com was
one of their DNS servers, they need to get INTERNIC to change the
glue records in the com. domain, which apparently hasn't happened yet.
If http://www.iomega.com doesn't work, try http://206.65.85.218
instead (until they get the DNS fixed; putting addresses in a URL
can usually be done, but is a bad practice except as a last resort).
The format.dat info is available via Iomega's fax response system,
phone (801) 778-5763, as document number 2019. Typical voice-menu
fax callback setup, just follow the prompts.
The Solaris 2.x version of the entries for a 1GB jaz cartridge or
100Mb zip cartridge follow. The document also includes entries for
various other Iomega drives, although I don't see an entry for the
560Mb (?) Jaz cartridges. The document also has the slightly
different SunOS 4.x entries; main difference is SunOS 4.x uses
the partition letter "c" vice partition number "2", and on 4.1.1
instead of "SCSI" use "MD21". Or so I summarize what I think it
says...
disk_type="Jaz 1GB"\
:ctlr=SCSI\
:ncyl=1018:acyl=2:pcyl=1020:nhead=64\
:nsect=32:rpm=3600:bpt=16384
partition="Jaz 1GB"\
:disk="Jaz 1GB":ctlr=SCSI\
:2=0,2084864
disk_type="Zip 100"\
:ctlr=SCSI\
:ncyl=2406:acyl=2:pcyl=2408:nhead=2\
:nsect=40:rpm=3600:bpt=20480
partition="Zip 100"\
:disk="Zip 100":ctlr=SCSI\
:2=0,192480
Typos, if any, are probably mine. The implausible nhead=64
in the Jaz entry is however correct. It is undoubtedly some sort
of polite fiction (I can't find *anything* that discusses the real
geometry of a Jaz drive, except that it allegedly has two platters,
which with normal usage would mean max 4 heads), but it does work,
or at least did for me, although it may prove somewhat problematic
in contexts I won't elaborate further on here.
Get the document anyway if you can, better to have it from the
horse's mouth.
The Jaz Tools (and presumably Zip Tools) cartridges that come with
the drives cannot be reformatted without trickery, but they say that
they will exchange those for blank cartridges that will format ok if
you want to. The trickery that worked for me depended on having
another blank Jaz cartridge already formatted. I put that one in
the drive, started format in one window, selected the drive, and
ran "eject -f /dev/rdsk/c0t2d0s0" (my Jaz drive is target 2) in
another window, and then replaced the blank cartridge with the
Jaz tools cartridge. At that point, commands like "label", etc. would
*not* work, only the "format" command would work. After that worked,
I could partition it, label it, etc. the way I wanted. Without the
trickery, "format" wouldn't recognize the drive when the virgin Jaz
Tools cartridge was in it; the disk swap let me get past that point.
I won't refuse questions, but that's most of what I know at this
point, except for one thing that I'm simply not telling. So in
all probability, the answer would either be "I don't know", or
"I'm not telling".
> The bad news is that, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't any way to
> create or access FAT file systems on Zip or Jaz drives from Sparc Solaris.
Someone was supposedly going to try to use mtools to do it. The
question is whether a Zip or Jaz drive formatted on a PC has an
FDISK partition table on it or not, and if so, whether mtools can
handle that too ('cause Sparc Solaris doesn't know beans from
FDISK partitions). I haven't heard whether they had any luck trying
that or not. If it does require FDISK partitions to be PC compatible
(and I suspect it will), there would be no way to mount a DOS partition
using pcfs, at least on Sparc, 'cause as I said it wouldn't know what
constituted a partition if that was defined as per FDISK.
--
ftp> get |fortune
377 I/O error: smart remark generator failed
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