SUMMARY: Iomega zip-100 (pcfs) on SS5

From: Renzo Toma (renzo@veronica.nl)
Date: Wed Jul 15 1998 - 07:21:18 CDT


My original mail below and beneath that the e-mail from Vincent Campbell
which I (again) like to thank for the quick and detailed response.

Cheers,

-Renzo

> Hi there, I am trying to connect a Iomega zip-100 to a SS5 running solaris
> 2.4 Already found some info thru dejanews but mostly x86. I am wondering
> if its even possible to use PC zip's on sparc architecture. So my
> question: if someone has experience with this matter, please give me some
> pointers on how to get the drive working.

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I've also got a SS5 (Sol 2.5), and an Iomega ZIP Plus Drive - this
has a parallel/SCSI autodetect that seems to work ok (although I have
been warned it can cause problems if there is more than one device on
the SCSI chain).

I can connect it to the parallel port of an NT machine or the SCSI
port of a SS5. (I had to buy a D25<->D50mini cable converter for this).

Basically you can work with Sun UFS filesystems no problem, but you'll
need something like mtools to acces DOS filesystems.

SUN UFS FS
-----------

 Iomega have a very good note on this.
 Check out : http://www.iomega.com/support/techs/zip/2019.html

        Summary:

        SCSI ID 5 seems to be default for many tools. Use this if
        it's not already in use.

        Just add entries to /etc/format.dat as given in above web page

        do a boot -r

        run format .... you should see the ZIP disk
                          (if the Zip disk is unformatted or non Sun UFS you
                           will get a "drive type unknown" message -just select
                           the disknumber and then select "15. Zip 100" from
                           the list given)
                        format zip disk
                        partition it (I just use default whole disk partition)
                        label
                        quit

        create a FS ... newfs -v /dev/rdsk/c0t5d0s2 (target 5)

        mount it ... mount /dev/dsk/c0t5d0s2 /mnt (or /zip, etc)
    
        then just use like a normal partition.

        
MS DOS VFAT
-----------

I read somewhere that the Solaris (pre 2.5) pcfs driver doesn't understand
a PC FAT disk, so you can't mount a FAT format Zip disk - this was supposed
to be fixed in Solaris 2.6, but I haven't checked this yet.

So, you'll need to install something like mtools which you'll find at:

ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/disk-management/mtools-3.9.1.tar.gz

Installing mtools is pretty straightforward.

You'll need to create an /etc/mtools.conf (or /usr/local/etc/mtools.conf)
with an entry something like:

   # Drive Z is ZIP-100 at target 5
   drive z: file="/dev/rdsk/c0t5d0s2" partition=4 scsi=1 nodelay

Then use mzip -e z: to eject the disk
         mdir z: to list the contents of the disk
         mcopy to copy files
         etc.

Have fun.

Vincent

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