SUMMARY: Iomega Jazz Drives and SunOS/Solaris

From: Systems Administrator (sysadmin@astrosun.tn.cornell.edu)
Date: Mon May 13 1996 - 08:24:08 CDT


Hello and thanks for the replies.

The answer is that the Jaz and Zip drives can be used on a machine
running SunOS/Solaris. Following are some references to articles in
SunExpert and Unix Review which talke about using such drives with unix.
There is also a format.dat entry gratiously sent by Mike Vevea
<Mike.Vevea@nmr.MGH.Harvard.edu>.

Thanks to all!
=======================================================================
My original Post:

but I can't find any answers.

Will the Jaz drive work in UNIX under SunOS or Solaris? We would be
hanging the drive off of a sparc station scsi buss.

Any info on configuration and/or setup if possible would be appreciated.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Replies:

From:Wis Macomson <wis@sequent.com>
The Zip drive goes in easily: refer to the July, 1995 issue of
_Sun Expert_ magazine. Richard Morin went through the steps
for 4.1.x .

I would hazard a guess that the Jaz drive is very similar.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From:John Justin Hough <john@oncology.uthscsa.edu)
In Unix Review or SunWorld there was an article by a guy who used
  BSD 4.4 sources to build a file system for them in particular.

  So, I know that it is realy possible. But I don't know if you
  have to go to all that trouble. The point of the article was
  basically that you build anything ontop of vfs in Solaris. so
  it is pretty neat.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Vevea <Mike.Vevea@nmr.MGH.Harvard.edu>
I've used Zip and Jaz drives on both SunOS 4.1.[34] and Solaris 2.[345]
systems. They work fine. The Zip is rather slow, and small enough that
it is somewhat hard to build a bootable disk, but it can be done. The
Jaz is reasonably fast (a touch slower than my older hard drives). I
had
a disk crash, and ran the machine on my own desk with a Jaz for my boot
drive
for a couple of weeks, with no problems. I don't have any Zips, and
didn't
keep my format.dat data for them (they're too small for my needs, plus
they're
slow.) But I'm about to order a Jaz drove for each of my workstations.
If
it helps, here is the format.dat data which I'm using:

    # iomega jaz, hacked by mikeV. NOT real numbers!
    disk_type = "Jaz 1GB" \
        : ctlr = SCSI : fmt_time = 4 \
        : ncyl = 1018 : acyl = 2 : pcyl = 1020 : nhead = 64 : nsect = 32
\
        : rpm = 3600 : bpt = 16384

    partition = "Jaz Data" \
        : disk = "Jaz 1GB" : ctlr = SCSI \
        : 0 = 0, 1 : 2 = 0, 2085930 : 7 = 1, 2085440

    partition = "Jaz Bootable" \
        : disk = "Jaz 1GB" : ctlr = SCSI \
        : 0 = 0, 62720 : 1 = 128, 125440 : 2 = 0, 2085930 : 6 = 384,
637000 \
        : 7 = 1684, 1260770

I use the first layout for one big data only partition. I use the
second for
a bootable drive. Both work quite nicely.

-- 
***************************************************************
                      Systems Administrator
                      ---------------------
                   Space Sciences Building CRSR
   Mail all system related problems to one of the following:
sysadmin@astrosun.tn.cornell.edu   root@astrosun.tn.cornell.edu          
sysadmin@spacenet.tn.cornell.edu   root@spacenet.tn.cornell.edu
                              or see 
Vic Germani in room 402         germani@astrosun.tn.cornell.edu
***************************************************************



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:10:59 CDT