Using Zips on Sun Workstations

Some machines in the Statistics Department have Iomega Zip drives attached for use with PC formatted Zip cartridges. This is useful for users who have a Zip drive attached to their home computer. The Sun Solaris volume manager which mounts PC floppy diskettes will not recognize Zip diskettes at this time, so we use mtools at the command line as a work-around.

The mtools suite of diskette utilities is designed to work with PC formatted diskettes, and closely copies DOS diskette commands, with the addition of a leading "m" in their name. The table below outlines the mtools commands and their actions. Commands in blue are the most commonly used ones. Just insert the diskette and start typing commands - you do not need to mount the disk or tell the computer to eject it.
NOTE: also see the man pages, available by typing "man command" at a unix prompt, where command is the utility you are interested in.

mattrib change MSDOS file attribute flags
mbadblocks tests a floppy disk, and marks the bad blocks in the FAT
mcd change MSDOS directory
mcopy copy MSDOS files to/from Unix
mdel delete an MSDOS file
mdeltree delete an MSDOS directory recursively
mdir display an MSDOS directory
mformat add an MSDOS filesystem to a low-level formatted floppy disk
minfo display information about an MSDOS diskette
mlabel make an MSDOS volume label
mmd make an MSDOS subdirectory
mmount mount an MSDOS disk (Linux only)
mmove move or rename an MSDOS file or subdirectory
mpartition partition an MSDOS diskette
mrd remove an MSDOS subdirectory
mread copy MSDOS files to/from Unix
mren rename an existing MSDOS file
mtools utilities to access DOS disks in Unix
mtoolstest tests and displays the configuration
mtype display contents of an MSDOS file
mwrite copy MSDOS files to/from Unix
mzip change protection mode and eject disk on Zip/Jaz drive

Technical Details

Zip drives are supported by the mtools suite of MS/DOS diskette tools which are available from http://mtools.linux.lu/mtools-3.9.1.tar.gz. Use of Zip disks with mtools requires the following lines be added to /etc/format.dat under Solaris 2.x to allow for the Zip drive's media.

#
# ZIP formatting stuff for reading PC disks with mtools
#
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
        :2=0,1159168